CVGRJun 22

Token-to-Token Alignment of Text Embeddings for Semantic Blending

arXiv:2606.2402114.3
Predicted impact top 29% in CV · last 90 daysOriginality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

For users of text-to-image generative models, this work addresses the lack of semantic structure in token sequences, enabling smooth transitions and blending, though it is an incremental improvement over existing alignment techniques.

Token-to-Token alignment transforms text prompts into a structured representation where semantically corresponding concepts are aligned, enabling smooth linear interpolation for image blending and continuous editing in text-to-image models. The method achieves coherent semantic transitions without modifying the generative model.

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.

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