PureCC: Pure Learning for Text-to-Image Concept Customization
Authors: Zhichao Liao, Xiaole Xian, Qingyu Li, Wenyu Qin, Meng Wang, Weicheng Xie, Siyang Song, Pingfa Feng, Long Zeng, Liang Pan
Organizations: Tsinghua University · School of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Shenzhen University · Kling Team, Kuaishou Technology · Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Shenzhen University · University of Exeter · S-Lab, Nanyang Technological University
Existing concept customization methods have achieved remarkable outcomes in high-fidelity and multi-concept customization. However, they often neglect the influence on the original model's behavior and capabilities when learning new personalized concepts. To address this issue, we propose PureCC. PureCC introduces a novel decoupled learning objective for concept customization, which combines the implicit guidance of the target concept with the original conditional prediction. This separated form enables PureCC to substantially focus on the original model during training. Moreover, based on this objective, PureCC designs a dual-branch training pipeline that includes a frozen extractor providing purified target concept representations as implicit guidance and a trainable flow model producing the original conditional prediction, jointly achieving pure learning for personalized concepts. Furthermore, PureCC introduces a novel adaptive guidance scale λ⋆ to dynamically adjust the guidance strength of the target concept, balancing customization fidelity and model preservation. Extensive experiments show that PureCC achieves state-of-the-art performance in preserving the original behavior and capabilities while enabling high-fidelity concept customization. The code is available at https://github.com/lzc-sg/PureCC.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Original Distribution Drift. Visualization and KL Divergence results demonstrated that existing methods, which adjust pre-trained models to align with the target distribution for learning personalized concepts, lead to distribution drift.
Figure 3: Overview of our PureCC. (a). We first fine-tune a flow model on the custom set as representation extractor. (b). During the pure learning stage, the representation extractor remains frozen and provides the target concept representation, which is then controlled by our adaptive scale λ⋆ to implicitly guide the trainable model. The trainable model is initialized from another pre-trained flow model and provides original conditional prediction using the Base Text as input. The entire pipeline is trained on the custom set using LPureCC and LCC . (c). demonstrates the process of using our designed LPureCC to purely learn the target concept in the velocity flow space.
Figure 4: Motivation of Adaptive Scale λ⋆ . A small λ can preserve the original model’s behavior and capabilities but leads to a decrease in the fidelity of the target concept. Conversely, when λ is excessively large , the personalized concept dominates the learning objective, causing the final distribution to drift away from the original distribution. This results in a degradation of the model’s generative ability : the underlying prompt cannot be followed and lower CLIP-T and HPSv2.1 scores.
Table 1: Quantitative Comparison Results on DreamBenchCC. Since UNO and DreamO are Tuning-free methods that do not require fine-tuning the base model, our comparison for them focuses mainly on their concept responsiveness.
Figure 6: Qualitative comparison in Multi-Concept Customization with Mix-of-show [ 13 ] , LoRA-S [ 53 ] .
Figure 7: Qualitative comparison of style–instance customization across different methods, including CIFC [ 9 ] , B-LoRA [ 11 ] , DreamO [ 31 ] . B-LoRA is a tuning-based approach specifically designed for balancing style and content adaptation. Each case combines an instance concept with a specific style.
Figure 8: Visualization of Pure Learning Process. x0PureCC denotes the images obtained by integrating the velocity field {vtPureCC}t=1T . Similarly, x0original and x0complete are based on {vtoriginal}t=1T and {vtcomplete}t=1T , respectively. “iter” denotes the training iteration.
Strategy
Preservation
Concept Responsiveness
Δ CLIP-T (base) ( ↑ )
Δ HPSv2.1 ( ↑ )
Δ PickScore ( ↑ )
Seg-Cons ( ↑ )
CLIP-I (target) ( ↑ )
DINO ( ↑ )
LCC
-4.52
-2.01
-2.95
23.74
0.65
0.66
Merged Training Stage
-1.17
-0.34
-1.08
54.37
0.50
0.41
LCC + LPureCC
-0.31
+0.10
-0.67
69.37
0.81
0.73
Table 2: Ablation Study on the Pure Learning. “Merged Learning Stage” refers to the training setting where the first-stage Representation Extractor vtθ1 and the second-stage Pure Learning of vtθ2 are conducted jointly.
Figure 9: Visualization of the Ablation Study.
Strategy
Instance
Style
Δ CLIP-T (base) ( ↑ )
CLIP-I (target) ( ↑ )
Δ CLIP-T (base) ( ↑ )
CSD ( ↑ )
λ=1.0
-0.18
0.43
-0.67
0.26
λ=3.0
-0.51
0.58
-0.93
0.61
λ=5.0
-2.67
0.73
-4.21
0.42
λ=λ⋆ (adaptive)
-0.31
0.81
-0.26
0.63
Table 3: Ablation Study of the λ⋆ .
Figure 10: Some samples selected from the dataset proposed by DreamBooth [ 36 ] .
Figure 11: Some samples additionally collected by us.
Figure 12: Some style samples in our DreamBenchPCC.
Figure 13: More qualitative evaluation results
Figure 14: More qualitative evaluation results
Representation Extrator (stage-1)
Pure Learning (stage-2)
Memory Cost
28GB
30GB
Training Time
0.13 (A100 Hour)
0.2 (A100 Hour)
Table 4: Computation Time and Memory Usage of Training under BFloat16 datatype.
DreamBooth
LoRA
Mix-of-Show
CIFC
PureCC (Ours)
Training
58.0G / 0.25h
28.0G / 0.13h
32.0G / 0.23h
31.0G / 0.28h
30.0G / 0.33h
Inference
17.4G / 4.46s
17.8G / 4.72s
18.4G / 5.80s
18.0G / 5.48s
17.8G / 4.72s
Table 5: Comparisons on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU
Figure 15: Qualitative Analysis of the η .
Strategy
Instance
Style
Δ CLIP-T (base) ( ↑ )
CLIP-I (target) ( ↑ )
Δ CLIP-T (base) ( ↑ )
CSD ( ↑ )
η=0.5
-1.32
0.55
-2.02
0.49
η=1.0
-0.31
0.81
-0.26
0.63
η=1.5
-0.43
0.80
-0.26
0.60
η=2.0
-0.76
0.67
-0.41
0.39
Table 6: Quantitative of the η .
Figure 16: Results compared to which Original Conditional Prediction is provided by the Trainable model vtθ2(xt∣ybase) or another Frozen pre-trained model vtθ3(xt∣ybase) .
Figure 17: The investigation page in user study.
PureCC (Ours)
DreamBooth
PureCC (Ours)
DreamBooth+EWC
PureCC (Ours)
Mix-of-Show
PureCC (Ours)
CIFC
Original Behavior Consistency
98.5%
1.5%
96.9%
3.1%
91.5%
8.5%
94.6%
5.4%
Base Text Alignment
66.2%
33.8%
62.3%
37.7%
55.4%
44.6%
58.5%
41.5%
Aesthetic Preference
71.9%
28.1%
73.5%
26.5%
64.3%
35.7%
56.4%
43.6%
Target Attribute Fidelity
67.7%
32.3%
75.4%
24.6%
52.3%
47.7%
54.6%
45.4%
Table 7: The results of User Study. (PureCC vs SOTAs)
Custom diffusion models (CDMs) have garnered significant interest owing to their remarkable capacity for generating personalized concepts. However, the majority of CDMs unrealistically presume that the user's collection of personalized concepts is static and incapable of incremental growth over time. Furthermore, they exhibit significant catastrophic forgetting and concept neglect of previously learned concepts when incrementally learning a sequence of new ones. To resolve the above challenges, we develop a novel Continually Customizable Diffusion Model (CCDM), enabling users to perform concept-incremental versatile customization. Specifically, we design an attribute-decoupled LoRA (AD-LoRA) module and a relevance-guided AD-LoRA aggregation strategy to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. They can preserve concept-specific attributes of each task and leverage beneficial inter-task correlations to enhance the continual learning of new customization tasks. Additionally, to address the challenge of concept neglect, we propose a controllable regional context synthesis strategy that performs multi-concept composition in alignment with user-provided conditions. This strategy enhances the overall consistency in multi-concept synthesis by guaranteeing semantic independence between user-defined regions and their smooth boundary transitions. Experiments show our CCDM exhibits significant improvements over baseline methods.
Concept customization typically binds rare tokens to a target concept. Unfortunately, these approaches often suffer from unstable performance as the pretraining data seldom contains these rare tokens. Meanwhile, these rare tokens fail to convey the inherent knowledge of the target concept. Consequently, we introduce Knowledge-aware Concept Customization, a novel task aiming at binding diverse textual knowledge to target visual concepts. This task requires the model to identify the knowledge within the text prompt to perform high-fidelity customized generation. Meanwhile, the model should efficiently bind all the textual knowledge to the target concept. Therefore, we propose MoKus, a novel framework for knowledge-aware concept customization. Our framework relies on a key observation: cross-modal knowledge transfer, where modifying knowledge within the text modality naturally transfers to the visual modality during generation. Inspired by this observation, MoKus contains two stages: (1) In visual concept learning, we first learn the anchor representation to store the visual information of the target concept. (2) In textual knowledge updating, we update the answer for the knowledge queries to the anchor representation, enabling high-fidelity customized generation. To further comprehensively evaluate our proposed MoKus on the new task, we introduce the first benchmark for knowledge-aware concept customization: KnowCusBench. Extensive evaluations have demonstrated that MoKus outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the cross-model knowledge transfer allows MoKus to be easily extended to other knowledge-aware applications like virtual concept creation and concept erasure. We also demonstrate the capability of our method to achieve improvements on world knowledge benchmarks.
Continual personalization of text-to-image diffusion models requires sequentially acquiring new concepts while retaining previously learned ones. However, existing methods either suffer from catastrophic forgetting or rely on storing additional concept-specific parameters and spatial components, causing their parameter footprint to grow with the concept stream. This limits their ability to scale to long sequences of personalization tasks. We propose a rehearsal-free approach that uses a single fixed-size hypernetwork to continually personalize a frozen diffusion model. Instead of expanding the model as new concepts are acquired, the hypernetwork dynamically produces the concept-specific adaptations required for personalization while preserving previously learned concepts. Our framework further integrates spatial control into the personalization process, allowing users to specify where a personalized concept should appear without introducing additional per-concept components. This formulation enables continual personalization with a parameter footprint that remains independent of the number of learned concepts, aside from compact concept representations. Experiments demonstrate strong retention of previously learned concepts and reliable spatial grounding, matching or improving upon existing methods while scaling effectively to long streams of personalization tasks.
Wojciech Gromski, Patryk Krukowski, Jan Miksa +2
Wrocław University of Science and Technology · IDEAS Research Institute · Jagiellonian University, Krak´ow +2