cs.CVSep 29, 2026

STEPS: Scene Text Editing with Preserved Style Using Diffusion and Contrastive Style Encoding

Authors: Nicolas Thiebaut, Nameer Hirschkind, Xiao Yu, Kyle Spence

Organizations: Roblox San Mateo, CA, USA

Abstract

We introduce Scene Text Editing with Preserved Style (STEPS), a novel diffusion model architecture for quality text replacement in images. Scene Text Editing (STE), also known as Visual Text Editing, consists of changing the textual content in an image while conserving the original style, e.g. font, colors, orientation, background, etc. STEPS advances the state of the art in STE through directed focus on improved style preservation. We introduce a style encoder for visual text that captures style independently of textual content, and a model architecture that combines the style encoder with multiple semantic conditions (target text characters encoding and rendered glyphs). STEPS achieves superior results to previous STE methods in style preservation, output readability, and subjective quality.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

May 15, 2026cs.CV

Self-Prompting Diffusion Transformer for Open-Vocabulary Scene Text Editing via In-Context Learning

Scene text editing aims to modify text in a target region of an image while preserving surrounding background style and texture. Existing methods rely solely on image background information while neglecting the visual details of target regions, which discards stylistic features in the original text and essentially degrades the task to text rendering. Moreover, the conditions imposed by pre-trained glyph encoder limit the scope of editable text. To address these issues, this paper proposes a self-prompting scene text editing method that constructs style and glyph prompts directly from the original image, without introducing additional style or glyph encoders. We employ a two-stage training strategy: the diffusion transformer is first trained on large-scale self-supervised data and then refined using a small set of paired images. By leveraging the in-context learning capability of the Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT), it achieves open-vocabulary and style-consistent text editing. Experimental results on various languages demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in both text accuracy and style consistency. Our project page: hongxiii.github.io/mstedit.
May 17, 2026cs.CV

StyleText: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Stylized Scene Text Inpainting

We present StyleText, a large-scale dataset and benchmark for localized scene-text inpainting with style preservation. StyleText contains 28,518 image-mask-prompt triplets grouped into 9,932 scene families, enabling controlled evaluation of text legibility and visual consistency under shared scene context. We construct the dataset with an automated pipeline that combines LLM prompt templating, Flux-based source generation with key-value (KV) cache injection, OCR-based semantic filtering, polygon mask extraction, and mask-conditioned FluxFill augmentation. We define a reproducible evaluation protocol using normalized OCR metrics (word accuracy and character error rate) and CLIP image-image similarity with explicit preprocessing. A FluxFill+LoRA baseline trained on StyleText improves OCR accuracy substantially over initialization while maintaining scene style consistency, establishing a strong reference point for future comparisons.
Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

Diffusion Image Editing via Asynchronous Token Decoding

Text-guided diffusion image editing aims to modify semantic attributes of an image while preserving its identity, layout, and background. However, naïvely switching the text condition during sampling often causes global drift, as denoising dynamics propagate changes across tokens and can disrupt unedited regions. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{A}synchronous \textbf{T}oken \textbf{D}ecoding \textbf{Edit} (ATDEdit), an inference-time framework that views each sampler step as a parallel update of a globally coupled token matrix and enables token-indexed condition switching with differentiated update policies. Instead of applying synchronous target-conditioned updates to all tokens, ATDEdit estimates editable locations using token-wise conditional surprisal and applies target-conditioned corrections to the selected token set. It supplies source key/value memory at keep-token positions and projects selected keep-token latent rows back to their source values; these operations promote background preservation but do not constitute a pixel-level invariance guarantee. This approach combines local editing and background preservation without external or user-provided spatial masks and without model fine-tuning. On PIE-Bench, ATDEdit achieves the strongest reported preservation metrics, including 27.44~dB PSNR and 0.055 LPIPS, while retaining competitive semantic alignment.