SEAL: Semantic-aware Single-image Sticker Personalization with a Large-scale Sticker-tag Dataset

Text-to-image personalization aims to generate a user-provided subject in novel scenes described by text. However, most existing methods encode subject identity (fidelity) and context (editability) through the same conditioning pathway, forcing the two to compete for attention-map resources. We refer to this phenomenon as conditioning entanglement and show that it induces a fidelity-editability trade-off. We further provide causal evidence by replacing the target subject token with a generic subject token, which produces shifts in attention allocation and corresponding changes in context adherence. To this end, we propose Decoupled Guidance (DeGu), a plug-and-play framework that routes subject identity and scene context through two independent guidance streams. We further introduce a spatial mixing mechanism that dynamically fuses these streams, ensuring each operates within its semantically relevant region without interference. Furthermore, DeGu can be readily applied to existing personalization methods without modifying the underlying backbone models, consistently improving the overall personalization performance while enabling inference-time control over the fidelity-editability balance, across diverse methods and backbones, including flow-matching Diffusion Transformers (DiTs).

Subject-driven personalized text-to-image generation requires a pretrained diffusion model to acquire a specific subject from a few reference images while preserving subject identity, following novel text prompts, and maintaining sample diversity. Existing optimization-based methods instantiate subject adaptation through full fine-tuning, textual embedding optimization, or low-rank parameter updates; PaRa further constrains personalization from the perspective of parameter rank reduction. However, a uniform low-rank constraint or a uniform adapter strength cannot explicitly distinguish the capacity requirements of different denoising stages. Moreover, inference-time candidate selection driven mainly by identity similarity may compress the selected samples in the visual representation space. We decompose the problem into two complementary components: SPaRa denotes training-side stage-aware low-rank adaptation, DCAL denotes inference-side distribution-calibrated candidate selection, and SPaRa-DCAL denotes the combined framework. Theoretical analysis shows that timestep-dependent scaling controls the effective perturbation magnitude of a low-rank adapter, while identity-biased candidate selection restricts the radius of selected features around the reference center under explicit conditions. Auditable experiments under the SDXL and DreamBooth 30-subject protocol show that DCAL improves 1-LPIPS, CLIP-I, DINO-I, and CLIP-T on a fixed LoRA candidate pool, while revealing a clear trade-off with CLIP/DINO pairwise diversity and pairwise LPIPS. These results indicate that personalized generation should be evaluated through identity consistency, text alignment, and representation diversity rather than identity metrics alone.

Text-to-image diffusion models are increasingly deployed in open-ended creative contexts, yet their outputs remain impersonal, optimized for aggregate aesthetics rather than individual taste. Human preferences are pluralistic: one user favoring muted, nostalgic portraits may prefer vibrant street photography, while another gravitates toward dreamy film aesthetics. Existing methods require dense interaction histories or per-user fine-tuning, failing in cold-start settings and collapsing context-dependent preferences into a static representation. We introduce zero-shot image personalization from personas (ZIPP), which conditions image generation on natural-language personas (concise descriptors of a user's identity and aesthetic sensibilities) without any user-specific data or weight updates. ZIPP uses an LLM to rewrite prompts from the perspective of a given persona, steering diffusion models toward personalized outputs. To mine personas at scale, we train an inductive Graph Attention Network over a 22M-user Reddit interaction graph with dual contrastive objectives aligning graph structure with visual behavior, then verbalize learned representations into natural-language personas via an MLLM. We introduce ZIPBench, the first zero-shot personalization benchmark with 1.5K users, graph-mined personas, and 40K generated images. Across four benchmarks and 14 LLMs spanning five model families, persona conditioning yields consistent gains (13-20%), with frontier models benefiting most. In the few-shot setting, ZIPP matches or exceeds fine-tuned baselines trained on 100+ examples per user. ZIPP achieves the lowest preference distributional divergence (CMMD 0.16 vs. 0.55), and IPF-normalized demographic evaluation shows it substantially reduces subpopulation bias present in existing methods. Human evaluation confirms a 79% win rate over generic generation and 58-65% over all fine-tuned baselines.