Abstract

Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have made amazing advances. However, the status quo is to use text input alone, which can impede controllability. In this work, we propose Gligen, Grounded-Language-to-Image Generation, a novel approach that builds upon and extends the functionality of existing pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models by enabling them to also be conditioned on grounding inputs. To preserve the vast concept knowledge of the pre-trained model, we freeze all of its weights and inject the grounding information into new trainable layers via a gated mechanism. Our model achieves open-world grounded text2img generation with caption and bounding box condition inputs, and the grounding ability generalizes well to novel spatial configurations and concepts. Gligen’s zero-shot performance on COCO and LVIS outperforms existing supervised layout-to-image baselines by a large margin.