Ibrahim Mohamed Serouis, David Jaramillo Duquecs.AI
Text-to-Image (T2I) models have recently achieved impressive visual fidelity, yet their evaluation remains constrained by benchmarks that are often difficult to interpret and insufficiently diagnostic. Existing skill-based evaluations tend to overlook critical failure modes that strongly impact usability but fall outside standard taxonomies, such as global incoherence arising from missing parts or physically implausible configurations (e.g., floating objects). In addition, prompt difficulty is typically controlled along a single dimension; either prompt length or the number of elements to generate. To address these limitations, we introduce Imag-Eval, a controlled benchmark designed to assess how T2I models ground compositional natural-language instructions into visual outputs. Unlike prior work that conflates surface linguistic complexity with compositional difficulty, Imag-Eval explicitly seeks to disentangles these factors by independently varying both the number of instances and the combination of constraints (rules), while avoiding error propagation. This design enables fine-grained and interpretable analysis of where cross-modal instruction following fails. Our benchmark comprises 1,140 prompts and 8,842 combined rules, and we evaluate it on several state-of-the-art models. Complementing this analysis with an additional study of over 2,000 prompts from a concurrent benchmark, our results suggest that, for structured skills, compositional difficulty is primarily governed by the number of grounded rules and their binding to instances,, rather than by prompt length alone.
Multimodality translation (e.g., text-to-image) is a core generative AI task. However, existing approaches (1) follow generative paths that do not directly represent the source modality, limiting the flexibility of some sampling algorithms; and (2) are unidirectional, preventing inversion (e.g., image-to-text). We propose BIT: Bidirectional Image-Text Diffusion Bridges. In contrast to previous approaches, BIT starts directly from text and interpolates into images, providing (1) a source-aware generative path that enables diverse and flexible sampling algorithms; and (2) an endpoint-conditioned process that can be traversed from image to text, providing a unified, bidirectional generative framework. BIT is derived through stochastic calculus, yielding SDE forms amenable to simulation and tractable loss functions that scale to high dimensions. Our experiments show that BIT is competitive with denoising-diffusion and deterministic-flow baselines, and outperforms them on several vision--language and natural-science evaluations.
Multimodal understanding models that can jointly judge text-to-image (T2I), text-to-video (T2V) and text-to-speech (TTS) generation are increasingly used as "OmniJudges" for evaluation and automatic annotation. How reliably they understand what they score remains unclear, since existing benchmarks and training data tend to overemphasize positive examples and to conflate distinct failure modes, so a judge may score well without recognizing failures while its capability gaps stay hidden. Motivated by this, we introduce D3-Omni, a balanced and decoupled benchmark for diagnosing fine-grained multimodal understanding, covering 53 orthogonal binary dimensions (17/22/14) and 10,671 samples (3,526/1,998/5,147) across the three tasks. Rather than re-generating outputs, which may leak information across dimensions, we fix verified fully positive seeds and derive negatives through controlled prompt rewriting and atomic, dimension-isolating perturbations. The resulting D3 design is Dual-balanced, which helps alleviate negative-sample scarcity and per-dimension label imbalance; Decoupled, so that each error is attributable to a single capability; and Dynamic, steering construction toward under-represented regions of the label distribution as generative models improve.The suite reaches near 1:1 per-dimension parity and a uniform distribution over all total-score levels. Under this balanced view, even strong OmniJudges tend to struggle on modality-related dimensions, to confirm satisfied requirements far more reliably than they detect violated ones, and to treat nominally distinct attributes as largely a single decision, suggesting that aggregate accuracy may hide systematic blind spots that a balanced and decoupled lens can help expose and, in turn, address.
Dreams can be emotionally intense but difficult to communicate. We describe the Dream Scene Visualiser (DSV) system which turns written dream descriptions into a temporal sequence of four panel images visualising the dream. This starts with a large language model prompted to split a dream description into four chronological parts. Then a text-to-image model produces images for each part with visual coherence maintained across the sequence, and DSV regenerates any image not suitably matching the text. We evaluate DSV over 50 visualisations from dream descriptions in DreamBank, and report quality, fidelity and coherence results via objective measures employing the CLIP, DINOv2 and Qwen2-VL vision-language models.
Jasin Cekinmez, Addison J. Wu, Raja Marjieh +1cs.AI cs.CL cs.CV
Human language is highly polysemous. Many common words (e.g., "bank" or "palm") carry several distinct meanings that shape what humans communicate and imagine. Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to understand this multiplicity of meaning, but much less is known about how polysemy surfaces in other modalities such as images. We study this across 17 text-to-image and 15 text-generation models by giving each a polysemous word with no context to fix its meaning and measuring which senses are produced over many samples. We find a clear multimodal gap, where within every model family, generated images settle on far fewer senses than generated sentences (normalized entropy 0.10 vs. 0.25), and both are far less varied than what people imagine for the same words (normalized entropy 0.47). However, when we instead ask a model to list how often it would generate outputs corresponding to each possible meaning of a word, it predicts distributions that are more diverse than the actual space of outputs. These results reveal a multimodal gap in how foundation models express meaning, and how their understanding may not transfer faithfully nor equally across modalities.
Electronic Theater Programs (ETPs) serve as critical promotional media in the performing arts, comprising a multi-page collection of heterogeneous visual assets such as theatrical posters, performance details, and character portraits. However, existing text-to-image paradigms struggle with such complex design tasks due to their inability to comprehend long-context narratives and maintain visual consistency across multiple distinct pages. To address this, we introduce ETPDesigner, a collaborative Multi-Agent framework that directly synthesizes high-quality ETPs from raw dramatic scripts. Emulating a professional design pipeline, our framework orchestrates specialized agents for semantic script analysis, core poster synthesis, functional background generation, and the stratified composition of character assets. Central to ETPDesigner is a global style anchor mechanism that extracts visual priors from the core poster to enforce strict aesthetic uniformity across all generated components. Furthermore, we elevate the ETP from a static publication to an immersive interactive companion. By integrating portrait animation, customized speech synthesis, and persona-grounded Large Language Models (LLMs), our system enables users to engage in real-time, voice-enabled conversations with the generated virtual characters. To rigorously benchmark this task, we construct ETP-Pro, a domain-specific benchmark of professional theater posters and high-quality character portraits. Extensive evaluations demonstrate our method's superiority in producing semantically faithful, aesthetically consistent, and highly interactive program sets.
Yifan Xu, Baochen Xiong, Xiaoshan Yang +3cs.CL cs.CV
We introduce a new architecture design for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), Libra, capable of both multimodal understanding and generation. Libra architecture contains one vision system and one language system, connected by cross-modal bridges. This design decouples self-modal modeling and cross-modal interaction, enabling each modality to learn its unique representations while maintaining effective cross-modal comprehension. The decoupling is mainly achieved in a switch attention module and a switch FFN module, which dynamically routes the computation flow for self-modal modeling and cross-modal interaction scenarios. We evaluate the effectiveness in two important settings: \textbf{Libra-1} for the understanding-only image-to-text setting, and \textbf{Libra-2} for unified image-to-text understanding and text-to-image generation. In addition to the architecture design, we discuss various improvements on tokenization, positional encoding, and supervision. Experiments demonstrate that the dedicated Libra design enables mutual improvements on multimodal understanding and generation, achieving strong performance on both understanding and generation benchmarks.
Saar Huberman, Ron Mokady, Or Patashnik +1cs.CV cs.GR
In modern generative models, images are specified and controlled through text prompts. In practice, images are generated from sequences of tokens derived from these prompts. However, the space of token sequences lacks a consistent accessible structure: semantically similar images may correspond to sequences that differ in wording, ordering, and placement of concepts, while similar token sequences may encode very different semantics. This apparent lack of structure makes it difficult to perform smooth transitions in this space, hindering applications such as image blending and continuous control of edits. We argue that this limitation stems not from the absence of semantic structure, but from misalignment between representations. To address this misalignment, we introduce Token-to-Token alignment, a framework that establishes explicit semantic correspondence between tokens across prompts. Our approach transforms prompts into a structured representation in which semantically corresponding concepts are mapped to consistent positions across prompts, and then aligns their token embeddings based on semantic similarity. Concretely, the method consists of two stages: a structural alignment that rephrases prompts into a shared structured form, followed by an embedding-level alignment that matches token representations across prompts. With this alignment in place, simple linear interpolation becomes a meaningful operation, producing smooth and coherent semantic transitions and enabling applications such as blending and continuous editing. Our results show that text embedding spaces in text-to-image models implicitly encode a continuous semantic structure that becomes accessible once representations are properly aligned, suggesting that semantic control can be achieved by organizing existing representations rather than modifying the generative model.
Can representations learned for image generation also support the evaluation of generated images? We study text-to-image reward prediction as a downstream task of generative representation learning. To this end, we introduce DiT-Reward, which converts a pretrained text-to-image Diffusion Transformer into a reward model by processing near-clean image latents and aggregating text-conditioned image representations across transformer layers. Under the same training data mixture as HPSv3, DiT-Reward outperforms HPSv3 on all four evaluated preference benchmarks, reaching 85.6% on HPDv2 and 77.6% on HPDv3. When the generative backbone is frozen, a lightweight learned head can still extract meaningful preference predictions from its representations. Probing across depth further reveals that downstream reward performance is strongest in the middle-to-late layers and benefits from combining representations across different stages. We also observe consistent positive scaling with generative backbone capacity. Finally, when used to optimize Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large with Flow-GRPO, DiT-Reward outperforms HPSv3 along the matched training trajectory, with particularly clear gains in realism. Direct latent scoring also achieves a 1.65x inference speedup over HPSv3 with comparable peak memory. These results show that pretrained generative DiTs provide transferable representations for reward modeling and policy optimization.
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in text-to-image (T2I) systems, but they are typically limited to text encoding, while denoising is handled by newly trained generative backbones. The emergence of representation autoencoders (RAEs) shifts the generation target toward semantically structured visual representations, creating a latent space that is more compatible with pretrained LLM priors. Inspired by multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), where an MLP projector is sufficient to align clean visual representations with a pretrained LLM, we repurpose the MLLM itself as a noisy representation encoder, extending this mechanism from clean to noisy inputs. We present RepFusion, which uses the resulting MLLM outputs as the conditioning signal for a diffusion transformer. In controlled comparisons at similar inference budgets, RepFusion outperforms baselines that devote comparable capacity to newly initialized denoisers. These results demonstrate that MLLMs provide strong priors for denoising visual representations and that, by conditioning on evolving noisy representations, test-time compute can be productively spent on repeated MLLM conditioning in modern T2I systems.
Reward models are central to text-to-image post-training, but visual preference is subjective and better represented as a distribution over rubric scores than as a deterministic scalar. Existing scalar, score-token, and pairwise reward models over-compress uncertainty and fine-grained score differences, while reasoning-based generative rewards provide stronger judgments but are costly to deploy and difficult to use as direct optimization signals. We propose Z-Reward, a teacher-student reward modeling framework that decouples reasoning-heavy judgment from efficient reward deployment. The teacher is a large VLM that uses reasoning to infer rubric-aligned score distributions, and is trained with Group-wise Direct Score Optimization (GDSO), which combines policy-gradient rewards from distribution expectations with direct pointwise and pairwise supervision on score distributions and score gaps. The student is trained with Reasoning-Internalized Score Distillation (RISD), which transfers the teacher's reasoning-conditioned score distribution into a compact VLM without requiring explicit reasoning chains at inference time. On our internally annotated evaluation set, the 27B GDSO teacher reaches 89.6% human preference accuracy, outperforming SFT, RewardDance, and GRPO, while the 9B RISD student reaches 88.6%, outperforming the OPD baseline and closely matching the larger teacher. We further show that Z-Reward can serve as a differentiable reward signal for text-to-image optimization, yielding a 41.3% net human-preference improvement over the SFT baseline.
T2I models cannot effectively capture sentiment from various types of text, including diaries, as they primarily focus on visual object-related patterns rather than contextual emotional understanding. This paper proposes an emotion-aware text-to-image pipeline that generates children's hand drawing style images from short Korean diary entries. The proposed pipeline employs Qwen3-8B for recognising implicit sentiment from short diaries, and Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium fine-tuned with LoRA on children's drawing images with emotion-based trigger words for image generation. Additionally, this paper presents experiments examining the effect of emotion trigger words on generated images and discusses the limitations of CLIP Score as an evaluation metric for emotion-aware image generation.
The explosive growth of Text-to-Image (T2I) models, from large-scale versions to lightweight, real-time ones, now faces diminishing marginal returns from single-model scaling. Agentic T2I methods emerged to alleviate this bottleneck by using multiple models. However, existing agentic T2I methods suffer from three key challenges: reliance on expensive handcrafted priors or human annotations, rigid single-path decision mechanisms, and a neglect of inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce OctoT2I, a novel agentic framework that reformulates the T2I task as a joint optimization of generation quality and inference efficiency. OctoT2I implements a stateful, multi-round routing strategy that adaptively selects the most suitable tool based on its knowledge and memory. This strategy is enabled by a knowledge base built from scratch by our novel Self-Evolving Mechanism. This mechanism, which requires no human supervision, first autonomously defines foundational Conceptual Dimensions (eg, style, color, count) and then intelligently explores their combinations via an iterative" Propose--Solve--Evaluate--Learn"(PSEL) loop. The PSEL loop efficiently discovers each tool's capability frontier, driving continuous improvement without external guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OctoT2I achieves competitive performance (0.96) on GenEval while delivering a 90.3% inference speedup and a 56.6% energy-efficiency gain over the leading baseline (Flow-GRPO), striking an exceptional balance between performance and efficiency. Code and models will be made available.
Text-to-image (T2I) systems increasingly rely on upstream prompters, either humans or multimodal large language models (MLLMs), to translate user intent into detailed prompts. Yet current benchmarks fix the prompt and only evaluate T2I models, leaving the prompting proficiency of this upstream component entirely unmeasured. We introduce AtelierEval, the first unified benchmark that quantifies prompting proficiency across 360 expert-crafted tasks. Grounded in a cognitive view, it spans three task categories and instantiates tasks using a taxonomy of real-world challenges, with a dual interface for both humans and MLLMs. To enable scalable and reliable evaluation, we propose AtelierJudge, a skill-based, memory-augmented agentic evaluator. It produces subjective and objective scores for prompt-image pairs, achieving a Spearman correlation of 0.79 with human experts, approaching human performance. Extensive experiments benchmark 8 MLLMs against 48 human users across 4 T2I backends, validate AtelierEval as a robust diagnostic tool, and reveal the superiority of mimicry over planning, advocating for an image-augmented direction for future prompters. Our work is released to support future research.
Text-to-image models produce graphic design at production scale, but their supervision comes from photo-style preference data with a single overall verdict per comparison. Designers evaluate along several distinct axes, including typography, visual hierarchy, color harmony, layout, and brief fidelity, and a single label collapses them. We release TASTE (Typography, Aesthetics, Spatial, Tone, Etc.): ten professional designers ranked outputs from four current text-to-image models on nine criteria across two disjoint cohorts, yielding 1,600 ratings per criterion plus per-image hallucination flags on the holistic-preference cohorts. We pair the dataset with three contributions. First, a criterion-agnostic signal test framework, using Kendall's tau, majority probability, and Condorcet cycles against exact iid-uniform nulls at p = 4 and R = 5, places designer agreement on graphic design between food and movie preferences and photo-style image quality, with every TASTE criterion rejecting the random-rater null. Second, no pre-trained system in our benchmark, including six open-weight VLM judges from 3B to 33B parameters and three dedicated T2I scorers, HPSv2.1, PickScore-v1, and LAION-Aesthetic-V2, exceeds 0.55 macro agreement with the 5-designer majority; VLM judges trade off position bias against content sensitivity, so scaling moves along this frontier without improving accuracy. Third, a small pairwise-difference head trained on TASTE reaches 0.611, closing roughly half the gap to the 0.741 single-rater ceiling.
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) integrate visual understanding and generation within a single framework. For text-to-image (T2I) tasks, this unified capability allows UMMs to refine outputs after their initial generation, potentially extending the performance upper bound. Current UMM-based refinement methods primarily follow a refinement-via-editing (RvE) paradigm, where UMMs produce editing instructions to modify misaligned regions while preserving aligned content. However, editing instructions often describe prompt-image misalignment only coarsely, leading to incomplete refinement. Moreover, pixel-level preservation, though necessary for editing, unnecessarily restricts the effective modification space for refinement. To address these limitations, we propose Refinement via Regeneration (RvR), a novel framework that reformulates refinement as conditional image regeneration rather than editing. Instead of relying on editing instructions and enforcing strict content preservation, RvR regenerates images conditioned on the target prompt and the semantic tokens of the initial image, enabling more complete semantic alignment with a larger modification space. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RvR, improving Geneval from 0.78 to 0.91, DPGBench from 84.02 to 87.21, and UniGenBench++ from 61.53 to 77.41.