pea-diffusion
Where Culture Fades: Revealing the Cultural Gap in Text-to-Image Generation
Shi, Chuancheng, Li, Shangze, Guo, Shiming, Xie, Simiao, Wu, Wenhua, Dou, Jingtong, Wu, Chao, Xiao, Canran, Wang, Cong, Cheng, Zifeng, Shen, Fei, Chua, Tat-Seng
Multilingual text-to-image (T2I) models have advanced rapidly in terms of visual realism and semantic alignment, and are now widely utilized. Y et outputs vary across cultural contexts: because language carries cultural connotations, images synthesized from multilingual prompts should preserve cross-lingual cultural consistency. W e conduct a comprehensive analysis showing that current T2I models often produce culturally neutral or English-biased results under multilingual prompts. Analyses of two representative models indicate that the issue stems not from missing cultural knowledge but from insufficient activation of culture-related representations. W e propose a probing method that localizes culture-sensitive signals to a small set of neurons in a few fixed layers. Guided by this finding, we introduce two complementary alignment strategies: (1) inference-time cultural activation that amplifies the identified neurons without backbone fine-tuned; and (2) layer-targeted cultural enhancement that updates only culturally relevant layers. Experiments on our CultureBench demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines in cultural consistency while preserving fidelity and diversity.
PEA-Diffusion: Parameter-Efficient Adapter with Knowledge Distillation in non-English Text-to-Image Generation
Ma, Jian, Chen, Chen, Xie, Qingsong, Lu, Haonan
Text-to-image diffusion models are well-known for their ability to generate realistic images based on textual prompts. However, the existing works have predominantly focused on English, lacking support for non-English text-to-image models. The most commonly used translation methods cannot solve the generation problem related to language culture, while training from scratch on a specific language dataset is prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we are inspired to propose a simple plug-and-play language transfer method based on knowledge distillation. All we need to do is train a lightweight MLP-like parameter-efficient adapter (PEA) with only 6M parameters under teacher knowledge distillation along with a small parallel data corpus. We are surprised to find that freezing the parameters of UNet can still achieve remarkable performance on the language-specific prompt evaluation set, demonstrating that PEA can stimulate the potential generation ability of the original UNet. Additionally, it closely approaches the performance of the English text-to-image model on a general prompt evaluation set. Furthermore, our adapter can be used as a plugin to achieve significant results in downstream tasks in cross-lingual text-to-image generation. Code will be available at: https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/PEA-Diffusion