# OccluRank: Controllable Occlusion-Aware Layout-to-Image Generation by Adding Just an Ordinal Rank

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20932 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20932/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [BoxDiff: Text-to-Image Synthesis with Training-Free Box-Constrained Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10816/) (2023)
- [LayoutDiffusion: Controllable Diffusion Model for Layout-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17189/) (2023)
- [MS-Diffusion: Multi-subject Zero-shot Image Personalization with Layout Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07209/) (2024)
- [Semantic Amodal Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01329/) (2015)
- [CreatiLayout: Siamese Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Creative Layout-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03859/) (2024)
- [EliGen: Entity-Level Controlled Image Generation with Regional Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01097/) (2025)
- [Instance-wise Occlusion and Depth Orders in Natural Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14562/) (2021)
- [LoCo: Locally Constrained Training-Free Layout-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12342/) (2023)
- [LaRender: Training-Free Occlusion Control in Image Generation via Latent Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07647/) (2025)
- [DC-ControlNet: Decoupling Inter- and Intra-Element Conditions in Image Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14779/) (2025)
- [Seg2Any: Open-set Segmentation-Mask-to-Image Generation with Precise Shape and Semantic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00596/) (2025)
- [InstanceAssemble: Layout-Aware Image Generation via Instance Assembling Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16691/) (2025)
- [Layer-wise Instance Binding for Regional and Occlusion Control in Text-to-Image Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05769/) (2026)
- [MUSE: Multi-Subject Unified Synthesis via Explicit Layout Semantic Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14440/) (2025)
- [DepthArb: Training-Free Depth-Arbitrated Generation for Occlusion-Robust Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23924/) (2026)
- [OcclusionFormer: Arranging Z-Order for Layout-Grounded Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21343/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Layout-to-image generation enables explicit spatial control through bounding-box layouts, yet bounding boxes specify only instance locations and cannot represent their occlusion order. Existing methods may rely on additional geometric conditions, employ complex inference procedures, or aggregate independently constructed instance representations without explicitly modeling their occlusion-dependent interactions. We propose OccluRank, a simple and controllable occlusion-aware layout-to-image framework that augments each bounding box with only one ordinal rank. OccluRank encodes the user-specified occlusion order through lightweight rank-based conditioning and introduces an Order-aware Instance Interaction (OII) module to jointly update rank-conditioned instance representations before aggregation. This allows the specified order to guide information exchange among occluding instances without additional geometric inputs or specialized inference-time optimization. We further construct OccluLayout, a synthetic training dataset whose occlusion order and amodal annotations are derived directly from known scene geometry rather than estimated from partially occluded images using auxiliary prediction models. For comprehensive evaluation, we introduce OccluLayout-Bench, which uses multiple multimodal large language model evaluators to assess instance presence, spatial layout, attributes, and occlusion order, together with FID for overall image quality. Experiments show that OccluRank more reliably preserves target instances, follows specified layouts, and realizes desired occlusion relationships while maintaining comparable attribute consistency and overall image quality.