# Unleashing the Power of Text: Text-Guided Flow Matching for Image Fusion under Complex Degradations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00530 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00530/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 18 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning and a Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Benchmark to Fuse Infrared and Visible for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16220/) (2022)
- [SegNeXt: Rethinking Convolutional Attention Design for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08575/) (2022)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [CDDFuse: Correlation-Driven Dual-Branch Feature Decomposition for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14461/) (2022)
- [DenseFuse: A Fusion Approach to Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08361/) (2018)
- [DDFM: Denoising Diffusion Model for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06840/) (2023)
- [AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14614/) (2024)
- [Text-IF: Leveraging Semantic Text Guidance for Degradation-Aware and Interactive Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16387/) (2024)
- [Infrared and Visible Image Fusion: From Data Compatibility to Task Adaption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10761/) (2025)
- [Text-DiFuse: An Interactive Multi-Modal Image Fusion Framework based on Text-modulated Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23905/) (2024)
- [TextFusion: Unveiling the Power of Textual Semantics for Controllable Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14209/) (2023)
- [MMAIF: Multi-task and Multi-degradation All-in-One for Image Fusion with Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14944/) (2025)
- [Vehicle Tracking Using Surveillance with Multimodal Data Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02627/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Infrared-visible image fusion under realistic degradation scenarios is a challenging task, as degradations not only cause a loss of reliable modality-specific information in observed images but also hinder the fusion process. Recent studies indicate that text can provide prior information about degradation characteristics, complementing the limited evidence available from corrupted input images and facilitating fusion. However, existing methods typically inject fixed global text representations into visual features, making it difficult for textual guidance to adapt to spatially varying degradations, local structures, and thermal saliency. To this end, we propose TGFusion, a text-guided latent-space flow matching framework that unifies degradation suppression and cross-modal fusion. TGFusion encodes task, degradation, and generation cues into structured prompts. To fully exploit these priors, we design a Prompt-conditioned Multi-stream Joint Flow Transformer that represents text as an independent semantic stream alongside fusion, visible, and infrared streams. Joint attention enables token-level bidirectional interaction and layer-wise updating among semantic and visual representations, allowing degradation semantics to dynamically guide reliable information selection and fusion latent generation. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and complex degradation scenarios demonstrate that TGFusion achieves superior or competitive performance in perceptual quality, image naturalness, structural-detail preservation, and infrared-saliency retention, while remaining robust across diverse single and compound degradations.