Papers for
text-to-image system developers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Multi scale transformers improve image generation quality significantly
Scale as a Modality: Multi-Scale Pixel-Space Diffusion Transformers
Abstract: Latent diffusion models rely on pretrained autoencoders that introduce lossy compression and constrain spatial granularity. Pixel-space diffusion avoids this bottleneck and enables flexible tokenization at multiple spatial scales, yet existing approaches largely adopt two-level coarse-to-fine architectures with limited cross-scale interaction. We introduce MS-pDiT, a multi-scale pixel-space diffusion transformer that treats spatial scale as a modality. MS-pDiT tokenizes the same noisy image at multiple patch sizes, processes each scale in a dedicated transformer stream, and enables bidirectional information exchange through compacted MM-DiT-style joint attention, with attention cost independent of the finest patch size. This design establishes the number of scales as a new architectural scaling dimension. On ImageNet $256\times256$, increasing the number of scales from two to five consistently improves FID from 4.39 to 2.31, 2.26, and 2.19, while adding an intermediate scale substantially outperforms increasing depth under comparable parameter budgets. Further analysis highlights the importance of bidirectional cross-scale interaction and late introduction of fine-grained streams. MS-pDiT achieves FID scores of 1.43 and 1.44 on ImageNet $256\times256$ and $512\times512$, respectively, and naturally extends to text-to-image generation, achieving 0.86 on GenEval and 83.9 on DPG-Bench.
TraceSampler improves image and text generative model quality fast
TraceSampler: Making Sampling Errors Predictable and Correctable for Accelerated Generative Sampling
Abstract: Accurate sampling from continuous-time generative models can require many model evaluations. Low-step sampling reduces cost, but coarse updates introduce endpoint errors that can accumulate and degrade generation quality. We introduce TraceSampler, a post-training method that corrects these errors without modifying the pretrained model. Rather than optimising low-step updates directly, TraceSampler models endpoint error as a sample-specific prediction problem. A higher-step reference integration over the same interval provides the supervised target, while a compact representation makes high-dimensional error predictable from the sampling trace. This representation combines shared residual structure, trace-derived directions, and a low-rank remainder, so shallow per-step MLP heads predict sample-dependent coefficients. These coefficients drive a two-stage learned residual correction: the first stage predicts the full endpoint residual, while an intermediate backbone evaluation provides new trace information to predict the remaining residual; this evaluation is reused by the following step. TraceSampler is evaluated with Rectified Flow on CIFAR-10, SiT-XL/2 on ImageNet-256, and SD3.5 Medium for text-to-image generation. At 10 steps, it reduces trajectory MSE relative to matched-step Euler by 90.5% on CIFAR-10 and 85.6% on ImageNet-256, while achieving FID scores of 2.692 and 2.189, close to 120-step Heun references of 2.601 and 2.056 with 24$\times$ fewer backbone evaluations. On SD3.5 Medium, TraceSampler improves image quality and prompt following; at 10 steps, ImageReward rises from 0.752 to 0.906 while trajectory MSE falls by 70.7%. These gains preserve Euler's backbone-evaluation budget, add less than 0.4% inference FLOPs, and incur negligible wall-clock overhead, showing that coarse-step sampling error can be made predictable from the sampling trace and efficiently corrected.
Rendered text can secretly control image generation behavior
When Scene Text Hijacks the Scene: Uncovering, Exploiting, and Mitigating Rendered-Text Semantic Leakage in Image Generation Models
Abstract: The reliability and accountability of image generative models (IGMs) are essential for building responsible and trustworthy AI systems. Recent IGMs, such as Nano Banana and GPT-Image, now support complex instruction following, realistic image synthesis, and controllable scene-text rendering. As these capabilities expand, safety analysis must also account for new control channels introduced by complex prompts. In this work, we study rendered-text semantic leakage, a largely overlooked phenomenon in open-domain text rendering. Although rendered text is intended to serve as a local visual constraint that should be reproduced verbatim in the generated image, it also carries linguistic semantics that may be interpreted by the model as part of the input instruction. This makes rendered text a potential semantic control channel whose safety implications remain insufficiently understood. We systematically characterize this phenomenon by decoupling the main visual prompt from the rendered text and measuring their individual and compositional effects on generated images. We quantify semantic leakage and rendering fidelity, and further analyze how leakage emerges from intermediate model evidence. We then show that harmful semantics embedded in scene text can persist through LLM-based prompt enhancement pipelines and steer non-text image regions, even when the main visual prompt remains benign. Finally, we propose a preliminary mitigation approach that reduces unsafe semantic transfer from rendered text to non-text regions while preserving the intended text-rendering behavior on FLUX-2-dev. Our findings reveal rendered text as a dual-use carrier of visible data and latent semantics, exposing a text-centric cross-modal attack surface in modern IGMs.
Arex sampler improves few-step flow matching for image generation
AREX: Affine-Residual Exponential Integrator for Few-Step Sampling in Flow Matching
Abstract: We introduce AREX, a training-free sampler for pretrained flow matching models that uses the target mean and covariance to capture an analytically tractable part of the sampling dynamics. We show that the velocity field of the moment-matched Gaussian target is the $L^2$-optimal affine approximation to the marginal velocity field. This motivates decomposition of the learned dynamics into an affine component over the whole sampling path, determined by the first two target moments, and a neural residual term. AREX keeps the affine component and integrates it using an explicit matrix-valued propagator. In turn, we only require to integrate over the residual term. This differs from scalar exponential integrators, which analytically handle only isotropic linear dynamics. Across image and text-to-image generation tasks, AREX consistently improves sample fidelity in the few-step sampling regime without retraining the underlying model.
Deep compression autoencoder boosts image generation speed and quality
DC-SAE: Deep Compression Semantic Autoencoder for Faster Diffusion Convergence
Abstract: High-compression tokenizers are essential for scaling latent image generative models. However, aggressive compression creates a fundamental tradeoff between reconstruction fidelity and generation efficiency: high compression image encoder always increases the learning difficulty of diffusion training, resulting in slow model convergence. Recent representation autoencoders speed up the diffusion training by improving the latent feature's expressive capability by replacing VAE encoders with pretrained semantic encoders, yet they are typically limited to moderate compression and lose pixel-level details necessary for faithful reconstruction. To achieve both high compression and fast diffusion training, we propose DC-SAE, a Decoupled Compact Semantic Autoencoder designed for high-compression image generation with accelerated diffusion model convergence. DC-SAE consists of two key components: (1) a macro-level architecture design that leverages semantic encoders to enable higher compression ratios, and (2) a pixel-level encoder that preserves low-level details, ensuring high-fidelity image reconstruction. We empirically demonstrate that DC-SAE performs strongly on image generation tasks, achieving both compact latent representations and efficient training dynamics. Specifically, on the ImageNet dataset with $512 \times 512$ resolution, DC-SAE achieves $32\times$ spatial compression, with 29.79 PSNR and 3.37 gFID, substantially outperforming the previous state-of-the-art high-compression tokenizer baselines DC-AE by 13.5% and 54.9% on PSNR and gFID, respectively, maintaining comparable throughput and faster diffusion model training convergence. Beyond class-conditional generation, a $1.6$B-parameter DiT using DC-SAE achieves 0.84 on GenEval and 86.007 on DPG-Bench for text-to-image generation at $1024\times1024$ resolution.