FreeControl: Training-Free Spatial Control of Any Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Any Condition
This provides a more flexible and efficient solution for human designers seeking fine-grained control in AI content creation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing diffusion models.
The paper tackles the problem of requiring trained auxiliary modules for spatial control in text-to-image diffusion models by introducing FreeControl, a training-free method that supports multiple conditions, architectures, and checkpoints, achieving competitive synthesis quality with existing training-based approaches.
Recent approaches such as ControlNet offer users fine-grained spatial control over text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. However, auxiliary modules have to be trained for each type of spatial condition, model architecture, and checkpoint, putting them at odds with the diverse intents and preferences a human designer would like to convey to the AI models during the content creation process. In this work, we present FreeControl, a training-free approach for controllable T2I generation that supports multiple conditions, architectures, and checkpoints simultaneously. FreeControl designs structure guidance to facilitate the structure alignment with a guidance image, and appearance guidance to enable the appearance sharing between images generated using the same seed. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superior performance of FreeControl across a variety of pre-trained T2I models. In particular, FreeControl facilitates convenient training-free control over many different architectures and checkpoints, allows the challenging input conditions on which most of the existing training-free methods fail, and achieves competitive synthesis quality with training-based approaches.