Beyond Starry Night: Shortcut-Aware Control-State Planning for Artist-Grounded Text to Image Generation
Authors: Kuan Xing, Ye Wang, Changyi Gan, Yuheng Li, Thao Nguyen, Yi Chang, Yilin Wang
Organizations: Jilin University · Adobe · University of Wisconsin
Abstract
Artist-grounded image generation requires more than appending an artist name to a prompt. Image models often respond to artist names through canonical shortcuts, such as recurring motifs, generic palettes, or overrepresented period signatures, rather than preserving the user's intended scene. We introduce Atelier, a shortcut-aware control-state planning framework for artist-grounded image generation. Atelier translates underspecified artistic intent into an explicit control state that separates scene anchors, preserve/transform decisions, style-regime hypotheses, role-bound artist evidence, and shortcut-avoidance constraints. It grounds this state using artist-level knowledge and local patch references, compiles backend-aware generation plans, and iteratively refines candidates through global and local authenticity feedback. We further introduce ArtIntentBench, a benchmark covering Van Gogh and Qi Baishi across artwork re-rendering, period/style-controlled generation, historically unseen subjects, shortcut auditing, and human preference evaluation. Across open-weight and closed-source generators, Atelier improves artist-level style fidelity, preserves source structure more faithfully, and substantially reduces shortcut substitution compared with prompt-engineered, retrieval-augmented, and general-purpose agent baselines. These results suggest that artist-grounded generation is bottlenecked not only by image synthesis, but by the upstream inference of explicit, evidence-grounded artistic controls.
Text-to-image generation has seen rapid advancements, especially with the development of generative models. However, challenges remain in achieving high-quality, contextually accurate image outputs that faithfully match the provided textual descriptions, especially in artistic generation. In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient retrieval augmented generation framework, namely MythraGen, for text-to-artistic image generation by integrating an art retrieval mechanism with LoRA-based model fine-tuning. Our method extracts features from a large-scale art dataset, optimizing the generation process by combining artist-specific styles and content. Particularly, retrieved images from an external art database that have the highest similarity to the query prompt are used to finetune Stable Diffusion using LoRA for desired art generation. Experimental results and user studies on the WikiArt dataset show that our proposed method can generate artworks that closely match the user's input, significantly outperforming existing solutions.
Quang-Khai Le, Cong-Long Nguyen, Minh-Triet Tran +1
Unified Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising paradigm for unifying visual understanding and generation, yet they still struggle to follow complex spatial instructions and logical constraints in controllable image generation. To address this gap, we present ATLAS, a unified framework that equips MLLMs with a human-like "Think, Plan, and Paint" paradigm. We adopt layout as the shared representation that connects the three stages, enabling the model to reason about spatial requirements, plan explicit object arrangements, and render the final image. We further improve plan-to-image fidelity with reinforcement-learning-based layout alignment. We instantiate ATLAS at 7B and 80B scales, achieving state-of-the-art performance among MLLMs on image generation benchmarks and an average 65.31% improvement over existing layout-based unified MLLMs. On spatially related tasks, ATLAS obtains an average 23.06% gain over the base models. Through the same layout interface, ATLAS also supports instruction-guided editing and multimodal grounding. We further introduce ATLAS-Reasoning, a benchmark for evaluating generation under complex spatial instructions.
Generative text-to-image models are typically trained on large-scale web-scraped datasets that include diverse visual content such as copyrighted and stylistically distinctive artworks, raising concerns about ownership, attribution, and the unintended reuse of protected visual expressions. A key issue is that models can learn stylistic patterns from this data and reproduce them in generated outputs without any explicit reference in the prompt. We refer to this phenomenon as The Silent Brush, where such learned styles reappear even when they are not requested. Existing evaluation methods mainly focus on near-duplicate retrieval or membership inference and do not account for this form of unintended stylistic resurfacing across prompts. To address these gaps, we first formulate guiding principles for evaluation of The Silent Brush. We then introduce Art Arena, an evaluation protocol that measures how strongly artworks are encoded, how they interact, and how frequently their stylistic traits reappear in generated outputs without explicit mention in prompts. We evaluate Art Arena on widely used text-to-image diffusion models, including Stable Diffusion v1.5, Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), and SANA-1.5, and design it to generalize across text-to-image generative systems. Our results show that The Silent Brush arises from differences in representational strength and interaction dynamics between artworks, leading to asymmetric blending in model generations. Code and evaluation resources are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ArtArena-EBE4.