Improving Text-to-Image Generation with Input-Side Inference-Time Scaling
This work addresses a key bottleneck in text-to-image generation for users and developers, offering a model-agnostic solution, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of suboptimal image-text alignment, aesthetics, and quality in text-to-image generation by proposing a prompt rewriting framework using large language models, which consistently improves these metrics across diverse models and benchmarks.
Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have achieved impressive results, yet existing models often struggle with simple or underspecified prompts, leading to suboptimal image-text alignment, aesthetics, and quality. We propose a prompt rewriting framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to refine user inputs before feeding them into T2I backbones. Our approach introduces a carefully designed reward system and an iterative direct preference optimization (DPO) training pipeline, enabling the rewriter to enhance prompts without requiring supervised fine-tuning data. We evaluate our method across diverse T2I models and benchmarks. Results show that our prompt rewriter consistently improves image-text alignment, visual quality, and aesthetics, outperforming strong baselines. Furthermore, we demonstrate strong transferability by showing that a prompt rewriter trained on one T2I backbone generalizes effectively to others without needing to be retrained. We also systematically study scalability, evaluating how performance gains scale with the capacity of the large LLM used as the rewriter. These findings highlight that prompt rewriting is an effective, scalable, and practical model-agnostic strategy for improving T2I systems. We plan to release the code and trained prompt rewriters soon.