Controllable Image Generation

Latest papers 125

Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

SceneCraft: Interactive System for Image Editing via Scene Graph

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.
Jun 14, 2026cs.RO

ControlMap: Controllable High-Definition Map Generation for Traffic Scenario Simulation

Simulation is central to validating autonomous driving systems, yet current pipelines are limited by insufficient scenario diversity due to costly High Definition (HD) map creation. Scaling HD maps requires expensive data collection and manual processing. Moreover, existing generative models lack the fine-grained control necessary to target specific road topologies during generation. This paper presents a data-driven pipeline for controllable HD map generation using latent diffusion and ControlNet for spatial conditioning. To our knowledge, we are the first to inject spatial guidance signals into a diffusion model for HD map synthesis. Furthermore, our model supports adjustable conditioning strength through classifier-free guidance and city-level style transfer via city label conditioning. To complement existing metrics, we introduce two novel metrics to evaluate adherence to the control signal and similarity to ground-truth maps. Experiments demonstrate that our model generates realistic HD maps that faithfully follow input road topologies while accurately preserving city-specific details.
Jun 14, 2026cs.CV

DenseControl: Instance-Level Controllable Synthesis of Dense Crowd Image

In this paper, we introduce DenseControl, a novel pipeline for generating dense crowd images. Specifically, DenseControl meticulously positions and sizes each generated instance to align precisely with the predefined coordinates and scales. Based on this, we further allow for control over the background, style, and attributes of instances. The motivation behind DenseControl stems from the observation of two main challenges in synthesizing crowd images: controlling signal embedding and maintaining topological integrity when imparting instance scale guidance. To address these, we first introduce the Isolated Object Embedding (IOE) map, a novel representation that facilitates spatial location control while mitigating the difficulties associated with learning projections for model. Secondly, we propose an Implicit Scale Embedding (ISE) strategy that seamlessly integrates with the IOE map to encode precise scale information. To further enhance the efficacy of combining ISE with the IOE map, we incorporate a Position Shortcut mechanism that enhances cross-attention to alleviate projection challenges. We evaluate DenseControl through two lenses: synthesis quality and applicability in latent applications. Experiments across different control conditions demonstrate DenseControl achieves state-of-the-art results in dense crowd image synthesis. Furthermore, we showcase applications in augmenting crowd analysis under data scarcity, transfer learning, and weather generalization scenes, to highlight the practical utility of DenseControl. The codebase will be released.
Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

EPIG: Emotion-Based Prompting for Personalised Image Generation

Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved impressive results in synthesizing high-quality images from natural language prompts. However, commonly used prompting strategies remain relatively generic, limiting the model's ability to accurately express emotional intent and nuanced affective attributes. This work proposes EPIG, a method that enhances emotional expressiveness at the prompt level prior to image generation. Grounded in psychologically informed emotion representations (valence-arousal) and leveraging structured, role-aware prompt enrichment, EPIG enriches emotion-related components of prompts without modifying or retraining the image generation backbone. The resulting emotion-aware prompts guide the generative process toward more emotionally coherent visual outputs, with particular effectiveness in controlling arousal. EPIG is lightweight, training-free, and well suited for resource-constrained and personalized image generation scenarios. Experimental results on a benchmark of 10 diverse prompts show that EPIG reduces mean arousal error compared to strong baselines, including naive insertion and LLM-based prompt expansion, with reductions of 14% and 12%, respectively. These improvements are statistically significant. EPIG also preserves valence alignment and semantic consistency, as measured by CLIPScore and supported by ablation studies. The effect is more pronounced on prompts containing explicit subjects such as humans, children, or animals, where the reduction reaches 17%, highlighting the subject-sensitive behavior of the proposed method.
Jun 9, 2026cs.CV

Pose-ICL: 3D-Aware In-Context Learning for Pose-Controllable Subject Customization

Subject Customization is a foundational task in modern image generation. By providing a few reference images and a text prompt, users can generate images of a specific object in any desired scene. However, existing methods still struggle to achieve effective pose control for customized subjects. In practice, they often exhibit inaccurate poses or inconsistent cross-pose appearances. These limitations suggest that understanding objects in a volumetric manner remains a significant challenge for 2D-native backbones. To address this challenge, we propose Pose-ICL, a tuning-free framework that leverages 3D-aware In-Context Learning (ICL) to directly adapt to new subjects through multiple paired image-pose references. Its core mechanism,Surface-Anchored Position Embedding (SAPE), equips the model with explicit 3D awareness by anchoring image tokens to the surface coordinates of a volumetric bounding box. Dedicated refinements ensure its seamless compatibility with existing DiT models. Extensive evaluations on both 3D assets and real-world subjects demonstrate that Pose-ICL significantly outperforms current methods in both pose accuracy and identity consistency.
Jun 4, 2026cs.CV

CoFi-UCGen: Coarse-to-Fine Unsupervised Conditional Generation without Label Priors

Unsupervised conditional image generation (UCGen) aims to control generation without relying on manually annotated labels, yet remains challenging due to unstructured semantic representations across granularities. To address this, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine UCGen framework (CoFi-UCGen) that explicitly disentangles global semantics from fine-grained variations, which to the best of our knowledge, sets out the first successful attempt for both coarse- and fine-grained conditional generation without any labels. More specifically, we first propose the adversarial semantic reciprocal learning theory to ensure the semantic consistency and completeness between images and latent spaces. Based on the consistency, we propose the bit-codes to learn a structured coarse-grained latent space, and further prove distinct global semantics inherent from our bit-codes while preserving independent noise sampling for generation. Building upon these bit-codes, we establish a fine-grained semantic basis and introduce a hierarchical modulation mechanism in diffusion models, by enabling layer-wise injection from coarse conditions to progressively control fine-grained attributes during generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that without any label priors or pre-trained feature extractors, our CoFi-UCGen consistently outperforms existing UCGen methods in terms of image quality, semantic consistency, and control accuracy, verifying the effectiveness of explicit coarse-to-fine semantic decomposition for the challenging UCGen task.
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

Do Models Share Safety Representations? Cross-Model Steering for Safe Visual Generation

Recent progress in generative modeling has made safety control a central challenge, yet existing approaches remain largely model-specific, requiring retraining or tailored interventions for each new architecture. In this work, we ask whether safety can be represented as a portable latent direction, learned once and reused across heterogeneous generators. We introduce the first framework for cross-model safety steering, in which a safety direction is estimated in a source LLM from paired safe-unsafe prompts, transported to a target generator through a lightweight alignment fitted on benign data alone, and applied at inference time. Crucially, our pipeline never accesses unsafe data on the target side, isolating whether safety can be transferred through shared representation geometry. Beyond a single global direction, we also identify a multi-vector extension that captures category-specific safety behaviors, enabling more selective control. We evaluate our approach in text-to-image and text-to-video generation across diverse source-target model pairs. Across models, transferred safety directions achieve ASR reduction and CLIP-Score/FID trade-offs comparable to directions learned natively on the target model using unsafe data, while requiring no target-side unsafe data. This indicates that safety improvements do not come at the expense of generation quality. Our results point to a modular view of safety: safety-relevant behavior is not purely model-local, but can be controlled through latent directions that persist across models. This suggests a new path toward lightweight, reusable safety mechanisms that do not require target-side unsafe data.
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

MetaPoint: Unlocking Precise Spatial Control in Agentic Visual Generation

Generative visual models fundamentally struggle with precise spatial control. This arises from a core disconnect: models can process textual descriptions of space but cannot directly map numerical coordinates onto the 2D image canvas. We introduce MetaPoint, a method that bridges this gap by representing a continuous 2D coordinate as a single, special token. Crucially, MetaPoint requires no new architectural components; it directly leverages the model's inherent positional encoding schemes to interpret these coordinates, treating our token as a virtual point on the canvas. This lightweight approach enables pixel-level control of an object's position with one token or its bounding box with two, all without requiring architectural changes or bespoke attention masking. The MetaPoint tokens are designed to be compositional, serving as spatial primitives. This allows a planner agent to decompose a high-level user request into a structured sequence of primitives for the generator. By providing a simple, precise, and scalable building block for spatial control, MetaPoint unlocks more powerful compositional generative agents and enables intuitive, interactive editing systems.
Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

Polaris: Scaling Up Instruction-Guided Image Generation Towards Millions of Personalized Style Needs

Users increasingly expect image generation models to quickly adapt to highly diverse and personalized requirements, such as producing images with distinctive styles or characteristics. Traditional approaches rely on fine-tuning, which is costly and difficult to scale. To cope with these limitations, the community has accumulated a growing library of fine-tuned modules and adapters, where each component targets specific generation needs and collectively serves as a foundation for handling new demands. This naturally raises a question: instead of repeatedly training new models, can we systematically exploit this expanding ecosystem to better fulfill user instructions? To this end, we present Polaris, an intelligent retrieval framework that automatically selects and integrates suitable models from the model library based on a user's instructions. The key insight is that harnessing such a massive and heterogeneous pool requires not only finding the most relevant modules among thousands of candidates, but also aligning them effectively for instruction-driven generation and editing. Polaris addresses this challenge by indexing over 6,500 checkpoints and 75,000 adapters, and retrieving the most relevant components given a user's input and instruction. In doing so, it delivers scalable, controllable, and well-aligned generation -- without any additional training.
Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

Anchor-Conditioned Compositional Control for Landscape Image Generation

Image generative models, though widely used as creative tools, offer limited support for the kind of compositional control that photographers and visual artists routinely exercise. This paper presents early results on an anchor conditioned finetuning framework for landscape image generation, in which a four dimensional compositional anchor vector is extracted from training images and injected into a diffusion model via a decoupled cross attention mechanism with Fourier encoding and three way classifier free guidance dropout. Quantitative evaluation against a baseline and three ablation variants shows that the proposed architecture achieves the highest horizon detection rate of 0.850 and the highest rule of thirds alignment of 0.817. A category specific ablation further demonstrates that training on compositionally homogeneous scene subsets reduces horizon deviation by up to 40 percent compared to mixed training. This establishes that compositional control precision is category dependent.
Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

Restoring Initial Noise Sensitivity in Text-to-Image Distillation via Geometric Alignment

Generative distillation significantly accelerates text-to-image (T2I) generation by compressing multi-step trajectories into few-step student models while preserving perceptual quality. However, existing methods primarily optimize efficiency and output fidelity, often neglecting critical properties of the original trajectory. In this work, we identify a key missing property: sensitivity to initial noise, whose degradation impairs downstream control methods relying on noise-based optimization and manipulation. We trace this issue to standard distillation objectives that enforce pointwise output alignment, inadvertently flattening the input-output landscape and suppressing the teacher's local geometric structure. To address this, we propose Geometry-Aware Distillation (GAD), a sensitivity-preserving framework that aligns the local functional behavior of teacher and student models. Specifically, GAD matches Jacobian-vector products with respect to input noise, enabling the student to reproduce the teacher's differential response to perturbations. Extensive experiments across multiple T2I paradigms and noise-driven control tasks demonstrate that GAD significantly restores sensitivity and improves diversity while maintaining high visual fidelity. Code is available at https://github.com/Hannah1102/GAD.
May 31, 2026cs.CV

MedSyn2: Flexible Control of 3D CT Generation via Text and Semantically-Defined Segmentation Prompts

Generative models for volumetric medical images have found many applications in medical imaging, ranging from data augmentation to serving as priors for inverse problems. For these applications, generating high-resolution 3D images with strong controllability is essential but remains highly challenging. Existing approaches typically control generation either through radiology reports used as text prompts or through full image segmentation. While text-based prompting is flexible, it provides limited spatial control over the location, shape, and boundary of abnormalities. In contrast, segmentation-based methods receive precise spatial guidance but are restrictive in requiring full-organ annotations. In this work, we propose a flexible multimodal framework for controllable volumetric image generation that supports input from radiology reports and segmentation prompts (both optional). Our approach allows users to provide segmentation of a specific anatomy or abnormality without requiring full-organ annotations. The semantic meaning of the segmentation mask is specified through an accompanying text description, resulting in a highly flexible and scalable conditioning mechanism. We develop a memory-efficient architecture based on a modified diffusion transformer that jointly processes image and segmentation tokens. The model further incorporates gated attention to effectively attend to long radiology reports. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art perceptual and semantic scores (e.g., 24% relative improvement in mean FID), generates high-resolution anatomically consistent CT volumes, and improves data efficiency when used for data augmentation. Radiologists' evaluation further confirms strong alignment between generated and real medical images.
May 31, 2026cs.CV

COLLAR: Cascaded Object-Level Latent Refinement for High-Fidelity Conditional Generation

Achieving high-fidelity object-level control in Diffusion Transformers remains a significant challenge despite the introduction of structural priors like depth and Canny maps. Current object-level conditional generation methods frequently suffer from visual artifacts and struggle to maintain precise control over objects within small localized regions. To address these limitations, we propose Cascaded Object-Level Latent Refinement (COLLAR), a training-free framework that progressively optimizes object-level features via the Field-of-View (FoV) expansion. First, we propose the Cross-Scale Semantic Alignment (CSSA) module to address spatial-semantic gaps by injecting object-level features into extended-FoV branches via attention mechanisms. To further optimize these features, the Cyclic Feature Injection (CFI) module introduces a reciprocal background feedback mechanism. It leverages a frequency-based adaptive strategy to selectively update the global backbone with context-aligned local information. Finally, the extended-FoV branch serves as a hub for feature optimization, ensuring that object-level features are integrated into the global generation process without compromising final image quality. Extensive experiments on the COCO-MIG and COCO-POS benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across semantic alignment, image quality, and spatial fidelity.
May 28, 2026cs.CV

GenClaw: Code-Driven Agentic Image Generation

Image generation models have evolved from text-conditioned pixel synthesis toward multimodal agents endowed with visual comprehension and tool invocation capabilities. Yet, existing agents remain at the mercy of underlying black-box image models. Their workflow is trapped in a repetitive cycle of prompt rewriting for generation refinement, leaving them with no mechanism to directly manipulate the canvas. In essence, the potential of LLMs to serve as a genuine "brush" for precise visual construction remains largely untapped. In this paper, we propose GenClaw, a code-driven agentic image generation paradigm that empowers the agent to create like a human artist: first conceptualizing, then sketching, and finally coloring. Specifically, the agent first constructs the conceptual knowledge and context through search and reasoning. It then utilizes code (e.g., SVG, HTML, ThreeJS) to render executable visual sketches. Finally, it employs an image generation model to supplement textures, materials, and photorealism. In this workflow, code serves as a controllable intermediate canvas bridging linguistic reasoning and pixel synthesis, seamlessly integrating programmatic logic with the visual expressiveness of generative models. By transforming image generation from a black-box paradigm into a staged process akin to authentic human creation, GenClaw offers a step toward for highly controllable and interpretable visual generation systems.
May 27, 2026cs.CV

MangaFlow: An End-to-End Agentic Framework for Controllable Story to Manga Generation

End-to-end manga generation is a structured visual storytelling task that requires story decomposition, recurring character and scene grounding, page layout design, panel rendering, page composition, and lettering. However, existing generative models often perform direct page synthesis, entangling these factors in a single visual output and limiting precise control over layout geometry, visual references, and cross-panel consistency. To address these limitations, we propose MangaFlow, an agentic framework for controllable long-form manga generation that decomposes manga creation into planning, grounding, layout construction, reference-conditioned rendering, composition, and text placement. By treating layout and visual references as explicit intermediate variables, MangaFlow enables both simple text-to-manga generation and more precise user-controlled manga creation. This design exposes layout, visual assets, and lettering as editable intermediate controls for refining panel geometry, references, and text placement. To support long-form consistency, MangaFlow introduces a story section memory that links section descriptions with corresponding character, scene, and object references for reuse across panels. We further present a meta-benchmark for evaluating layout controllability, visual consistency, and generation quality. Experiments show that MangaFlow improves layout adherence and cross-panel consistency over direct generation baselines while supporting flexible human control.
May 26, 2026cs.CV

Towards Controllable Image Generation through Representation-Conditioned Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for high-quality image generation and editing, but guiding these models to produce specific outputs remains a challenge. Conventional approaches rely on conditioning mechanisms, such as text prompts or semantic maps, which require extensively annotated datasets. In this preliminary work, we explore diffusion models conditioned on representations from a pre-trained self-supervised model. The self-conditioning mechanism not only improves the quality of unconditional image generation, but also provides a representation space that can be used to control the generation. We explore this conditioning space by identifying directions of variations, and demonstrate promising properties in terms of smoothness and disentanglement.
May 20, 2026cs.CV

UniVL: Unified Vision-Language Embedding for Spatially Grounded Contextual Image Generation

We introduce spatially grounded contextual image generation, a controllable image generation task that reframes the conditioning paradigm. Instead of supplying a reference image and a global text prompt through two separate encoders, one for vision and one for language, UniVL is trained to bind semantics to spatial locations directly from a single unified visual input, where the textual instruction is rendered onto the spatial mask. This removes the need for a standalone text encoder at inference time. The resulting model supports contextual image generation by following user-specified instructions about what should appear where, while substantially reducing computation. To address this task, we propose a framework in which the UniVL encoder, adapted from an optical-character-recognition-pretrained backbone, reads the unified condition optically and produces a UniVL embedding, fVIL, that fuses visual and semantic intent with spatial locations in a single token sequence. A two-stage pipeline first aligns UniVL with the VAE embedding space and then conditions a pretrained diffusion backbone entirely on UniVL embeddings, eliminating the standalone text encoder, such as T5. Although this reframing uses a deliberately minimal text interface, it yields strong empirical gains. On UniVL-ImgGen, a benchmark of 477K mask-annotated images that we construct for training and evaluation, UniVL improves image quality over text-prompted baselines, reducing FID from 14 to 11 and increasing PSNR from 16 to 20. It also eliminates the text encoder entirely, reducing inference TFLOPs by up to 52% and runtime by up to 44%. Additional ablation studies validate the contributions of the proposed components, paving the way for efficient, spatially grounded image generation with a unified conditioning paradigm.
May 20, 2026cs.CV

AttriStory: Fine-grained Attribute Realization for Visual Storytelling with Diffusion Models

Visual storytelling with diffusion models has made impressive strides in maintaining character consistency across narrative scenes. However, a critical gap remains: while these methods ensure a character remains consistent across scenes, they provide no systematic method to ensure if fine-grained attributes such as color and textures of clothing, accessories are faithfully rendered in the generated images. Towards this goal, we introduce AttriStory, a benchmark enabling attribute realization in visual storytelling. We curate 200 multi-scene stories across 10 distinct artistic styles using Large Language Model. Each scene is constructed with detailed attribute specifications to enable rich visual narratives. Further, to address attribute realization, we propose a plug-and-play latent optimization module that operates during early denoising steps, when the model establishes structural and semantic content. We achieve this through AttriLoss objective designed to maximize alignment between the cross-attention maps for desired attribute-object pairs while suppressing spurious associations, guiding models to localize attributes correctly. This approach operates orthogonally to existing consistency mechanisms, integrating seamlessly with current story generation pipelines without requiring architectural modifications. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements on incorporating AttriLoss across all baselines. This work positions attribute realization as a distinct, complementary dimension of visual storytelling, alongside character consistency, advancing the field toward fine-grained attribute-controlled story generation. Project-page:https://manogna-s.github.io/attristory/
May 19, 2026cs.CV

Tiny-Engram: Trigger-Indexed Concept Tables for Generative Vision

Current personalization methods for generative vision models typically encode new concepts through continuous adapters or weight updates, yet provide limited control over whether and when a concept should be retrieved. In this work, we introduce Tiny-Engram, a compact trigger-indexed concept table that gives visual memories an explicit lexical address and activation boundary inside frozen image and video generators. Tiny-Engram parameterizes each concept as a small set of memory entries indexed by registered n-gram matches, which modulate text-encoder hidden states only within the matched trigger region. Outside this lexical support, the conditioning pathway is identical to that of the frozen base model. Across both single-encoder latent diffusion and multi-encoder diffusion-transformer backbones, this formulation binds a rare trigger phrase to a target identity while preserving compositional control from the surrounding prompt. We further evaluate the same table-based memory in a text-conditioned video generation setting, where the trigger path reliably alters the generated subject but fine-grained identity persistence across held-out video prompts remains limited. Taken together, these results suggest that small, explicitly addressed concept tables are a practical route to modular visual personalization, with strongest evidence in image generation. For video diffusion, the remaining gap points to a broader requirement: temporally stable identity likely depends on tighter coupling between text-side memory and the evolving visual state, motivating future work on memory injection beyond the text-conditioning interface.
May 18, 2026cs.CV

Generation Navigator: A State-Aware Agentic Framework for Image Generation

Despite rapid advances in text-to-image generation, faithfully realizing user intent remains challenging, often requiring manual multi-turn trial and error. To automate this process, existing systems rely on either simple prompt rewriting or closed-loop agents driven by hand-crafted rules, rather than learning to adapt actions to the evolving generation process. In this paper, we reformulate image generation as a state-conditioned action-making problem and propose Generation Navigator, a multi-turn T2I agent that learns to dynamically steer the generation trajectory and output the next action. However, training this agent via reinforcement learning introduces a critical credit assignment challenge: naively rewarding a trajectory based solely on a single state assigns equal credit to all actions in the rollout, ignores the quality dynamics across turns, and fails to distinguish actions that improve the trajectory from those that degrade it or waste turns without progress. We resolve this with PRE-GRPO (Peak-Retention-Efficiency Group Relative Policy Optimization), a trajectory-level reinforcement learning objective that explicitly rewards discovering a high-quality image (Peak), avoiding subsequent quality degradation across turns (Retention), and minimizing unnecessary turns (Efficiency). Experiments show substantial improvements across benchmarks, reaching a WISE score of 0.90 and 79.06% reasoning accuracy on T2I-ReasonBench.
May 17, 2026cs.CV

Designing streetscapes from street-view imagery using diffusion models

Street-view imagery (SVI) is widely used to quantify key indicators of urban environment, such as green- ery, sky, or road view indices. However, existing studies largely focus on measuring current streetscapes and rarely support the generation of alternative and non-existing urban scenarios, which is a core task in geospatial disciplines such as urban planning and design. To address this gap, we propose a gener- ative multimodal AI framework that synthesizes alternative streetscapes conditioned on targeted visual metrics, enabling direct visual exploration of urban scenarios. We first construct a multimodal dataset that aligns SVIs with textual descriptions, segmentation maps, road masks, and quantitative metrics of visual elements in Chicago and Orlando. Using this dataset, we demonstrate that diffusion models can produce realistic and semantically consistent streetscape imagery while responding to both textual and imagery controls. Our quantitative evaluations show that incorporating visual controls can improve semantic consistency, reducing the LPIPS index by approximately 6% while maintaining global visual realism. In addition, overall semantic consistency increases by 23.7% in Orlando and 46.4% in Chicago, as measured by the mIoU index, with class-wise gains exceeding even 100% improvement for building view indices. Streetscape generation can be controlled in a fine-grained manner by both visual and textual prompts, and when textual and visual controls conflict, imagery controls consistently dominate, indicating a clear control hierarchy and the importance of further developing visual controls for urban scene generation. Overall, this work establishes an important benchmark for streetscape generation us- ing SVIs and diffusion models, and illustrates how generative AI can serve as a practical, scalable, and controllable approach for urban scenario exploration.
May 17, 2026cs.CV

AnimeAdapter: A Modular Adapter for Appearance-Consistent Anime Character Generation

We present a lightweight appearance adapter for Stable Diffusion that enables controllable and consistent anime character generation under diverse editing conditions. Instead of relying on large-scale vision-language models or per-subject fine-tuning, our method injects fine-grained visual features from a single reference image into the diffusion process. Based on CLIP emergent local spatialization, we develop semantic-selective local attention. To further disentangle character appearance from spatial layout, we incorporate pose-aware conditioning during adapter training. The resulting pretrained adapter remains compact, modular, and fully compatible with Stable Diffusion community workflows, while requiring no additional fine-tuning at deployment time. Furthermore, we present a high-quality anime character dataset based on curated and restructured Danbooru prompts, and evaluate our method across several practical character editing scenarios. Our code, model weights, and dataset will be publicly released upon acceptance.
May 16, 2026cs.CV

Latent Action Control for Reasoning-Guided Unified Image Generation

Unified multimodal models can encode visual understanding and image generation within a shared backbone, yet understanding does not automatically translate into control: models may infer objects, relations, or knowledge cues but fail to instantiate them in the generated image. We propose Latent Action Control (LAC), which makes reasoning actionable by representing it as hidden continuous actions inside a unified generator. Given a prompt, LAC rolls out a role-structured latent trajectory for planning, internal visual drafting, diagnosis, and refinement, and injects these actions into the hidden stream that conditions flow-based generation, without producing reasoning tokens or intermediate images. Since such action trajectories are unobserved, LAC learns them through prior-guided variational latent action alignment from training-only rendered semantic priors, draft image features, and supervised halting signals, followed by Latent-Flow GRPO to align the latent-to-image rollout with terminal visual feedback. This provides a control path from inferred relations, bindings, and knowledge cues to the generation process. Instantiated on BAGEL-7B-MoT, LAC consistently improves compositional and knowledge-grounded generation across GenEval, WISE, and T2I-CompBench, with the largest gains on spatial relations, attribute binding, and world-knowledge-sensitive prompts. Ablations and latent interventions show that the learned action trajectory is consumed by the generator, suggesting that unified generation benefits when understanding is not only encoded, but made actionable during generation.
May 14, 2026cs.CV

D2-CDIG: Controlled Diffusion Remote Sensing Image Generation with Dual Priors of DEM and Cloud-Fog

Remote sensing image generation provides a reliable data foundation for remote sensing large models and downstream tasks. However, existing controllable remote sensing image generation methods typically rely on traditional techniques such as segmentation and edge detection, which do not fully leverage terrain or atmospheric conditions. As a result, the generated images often lack accuracy and naturalness when dealing with complex terrains and atmospheric phenomena. In this paper, we propose a novel remote sensing image generation framework, D2-CDIG, which integrates diffusion models with a dual-prior control mechanism. By incorporating both Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and cloud-fog information as dual prior knowledge, D2-CDIG precisely controls ground features and atmospheric phenomena within the generated images. Specifically, D2-CDIG decouples the terrain and atmospheric generation processes through independent control of ground and atmospheric branches. Additionally, a refined cloud-fog slider is introduced to flexibly adjust cloud thickness and distribution. During training, ground and atmospheric control signals are injected in layers to ensure a seamless transition within the images. Compared to traditional methods based on segmentation or edge detection, D2-CDIG shows significant improvements in image quality, detail richness, and realism. D2-CDIG offers a flexible and precise solution for remote sensing image generation, providing high-quality data for training large remote sensing models and downstream tasks.
May 13, 2026cs.CV

Few Channels Draw The Whole Picture: Revealing Massive Activations in Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) and related flow-based architectures are now among the strongest text-to-image generators, yet the internal mechanisms through which prompts shape image semantics remain poorly understood. In this work, we study massive activations: a small subset of hidden-state channels whose responses are consistently much larger than the rest. We show that, despite their sparsity, these few channels effectively draw the whole picture, in three complementary senses. First, they are functionally critical: a controlled disruption probe that zeroes the massive channels causes a sharp collapse in generation quality, while disrupting an equally-sized set of low-statistic channels has marginal effect. Second, they are spatially organized: restricting image-stream tokens to massive channels and clustering them yields coherent partitions that closely align with the main subject and salient regions, exposing a structured spatial code hidden inside an apparently outlier-like subspace. Third, they are transferable: transporting massive activations from one prompt-conditioned trajectory into another, shifts the final image toward the source prompt while preserving substantial content from the target, producing localized semantic interpolation rather than unstructured pixel blending. We exploit this property in two use cases: text-conditioned and image-conditioned semantic transport, where massive activations transport enables prompt interpolation and subject-driven generation without any additional training. Together, these results recast massive activations not as activation anomalies, but as a sparse prompt-conditioned carrier subspace that organizes and controls semantic information in modern DiT models.
May 12, 2026cs.CV

MULTI: Disentangling Camera Lens, Sensor, View, and Domain for Novel Image Generation

Recent text-to-image models produce high-quality images, yet text ambiguity hinders precise control when specific styles or objects are required. There have been a number of recent works dealing with learning and composing multiple objects and patterns. However, current work focuses almost entirely on image content, overlooking imaging factors such as camera lens, sensor types, imaging viewpoints, and scenes' domain characteristics. We introduce this new challenge as Imaging Factor Disentanglement and show limitations of current approaches in the regime. We, therefore, propose the new method Multi-factor disentanglement through Textual Inversion (MULTI). It consists of two stages: in the first stage, we learn general factors, and in the second stage, we extract dataset-specific ones. This setup enables the extension of existing datasets and novel factor combinations, thereby reducing distribution gaps. It further supports modifications of specific factors and image-to-image generation via ControlNets. The evaluation on our new DF-RICO benchmark demonstrates the effectiveness of MULTI and highlights the importance of Factor Disentanglement as a new direction of research.
May 12, 2026cs.CV

EPIC: Efficient Predicate-Guided Inference-Time Control for Compositional Text-to-Image Generation

Recent text-to-image (T2I) generators can synthesize realistic images, but still struggle with compositional prompts involving multiple objects, counts, attributes, and relations. We introduce EPIC (Efficient Predicate-Guided Inference-Time Control), a training-free inference-time refinement framework for compositional T2I generation. EPIC casts refinement as predicate-guided search: it parses the original prompt once into a fixed visual program of object variables and typed predicates, covering checkable conditions such as object presence, counts, attributes, and relations. Each generated or edited image is verified against this program using visual evidence extracted from that image. An image is judged to satisfy the prompt only when all predicates are satisfied; otherwise, failed predicates decide the next step, routing local failures to targeted editing and global failures to resampling while the fixed visual program remains unchanged. On GenEval2, EPIC improves prompt-level accuracy from 34.16% for single-pass generation with the base generator to 71.46%. Under the same generator/editor setting and maximum image-model execution budget, EPIC outperforms the strongest prior refinement baseline by 19.23 points while reducing realized cost by 31% in image-model executions, 72% in MLLM calls, and 81% in MLLM tokens per prompt.
May 11, 2026cs.LG

Couple to Control: Joint Initial Noise Design in Diffusion Models

Diffusion models typically generate image batches from independent Gaussian initial noises. We argue that this independence assumption is only one choice within a broader class of valid joint noise designs. Instead, one can specify a coupling of the initial noises: each noise remains marginally standard Gaussian, so the pretrained diffusion model receives the same single-sample input distribution, while the dependence across samples is chosen by design. This reframes initial-noise control from selecting or optimizing individual seeds to designing the dependence structure of a multi-sample gallery. This view gives a general framework for initial-noise design, covering several existing methods as special cases and leading naturally to new coupled-noise constructions. Coupled noise can improve generation on its own without adding sampling cost, and it is flexible enough to serve as a structured initialization for optimization-based pipelines when additional computation is available. Empirically, repulsive Gaussian coupling improves gallery diversity on SD1.5, SDXL, and SD3 while largely preserving prompt alignment and image quality. It matches or outperforms recent test-time noise-optimization baselines on several diversity metrics at the same sampling cost as independent generation. Subspace couplings also support fixed-object background generation, producing diverse, natural backgrounds compared with specialized inpainting baselines, with a tunable trade-off in foreground fidelity.
May 11, 2026cs.LG

Follow the Mean: Reference-Guided Flow Matching

Existing approaches to controllable generation typically rely on fine-tuning, auxiliary networks, or test-time search. We show that flow matching admits a different control interface: adaptation through examples. For deterministic interpolants, the velocity field is solely governed by a conditional endpoint mean; shifting this mean shifts the flow itself. This yields a simple principle for controllable generation: steer a pretrained model by changing the reference set it follows. We instantiate this idea in two forms. Reference-Mean Guidance is training-free: it computes a closed-form endpoint-mean correction from a reference bank and applies it to a frozen FLUX.2-klein (4B) model, enabling control of color, identity, style, and structure while keeping the prompt, seed, and weights fixed. Semi-Parametric Guidance amortizes the same idea through an explicit mean anchor and learned residual refiner, matching unconditional DiT-B/4 quality on AFHQv2 while allowing the reference set to be swapped at inference time. These results point to a broader direction: generative models that adapt through data, not parameter updates.
May 9, 2026cs.CV

simpleposter: a simple baseline for product poster generation

Product poster generation poses distinct challenges beyond general poster design, requiring both faithful preservation of product appearance and precise control over dense, multi-line text layouts. Prior methods typically adopt inpainting frameworks augmented with auxiliary modules such as ControlNet and OCR encoders. However, these approaches introduce architectural complexity and computational overhead while still suffering from text errors and subject extension artifacts. We present SimplePoster, a simple yet effective inpainting-based framework that achieves faithful subject preservation and accurate, position-controllable text rendering without external controllers. Our approach builds on two observations: (1) full-parameter fine-tuning of the base model effectively suppresses subject extension, outperforming ControlNet-based alternatives; and (2) a zero-cost character-level position encoding enables geometry-aware text generation without dedicated layout modules. Experiments show that SimplePoster achieves a 98.7%98.7\% subject preservation rate, compared to 55.2%55.2\% for SeedEdit 3.0 and 85.3%85.3\% for PosterMaker, while also improving text rendering accuracy. Code, models, benchmark and a part of training data will be available at https://github.com/Alibaba-YuFeng/SIMPLEPOSTER