arXiv · 2509.15357
MaskAttn-SDXL: Controllable Region-Level Text-To-Image Generation
Abstract
Diffusion models have achieved strong results in text-to-image generation, but important limitations remain as prompts become more structured and multi-object. On the architecture side, U-Net backbones are efficient and stable, yet their locality makes global coordination harder, while Transformer-based diffusion models improve global interactions but at substantially higher compute and memory cost. In parallel, compositional reliability remains weak: models often mix attributes across objects, violate spatial relations, or omit requested entities, and these errors are not reliably reflected by global metrics such as FID or CLIP-based scores. To address these issues without changing the SDXL pipeline, we propose MaskAttn-SDXL, a plug-in module that injects token-conditioned spatial gating into cross-attention logits before softmax. The gating sparsifies token-to-location interactions to suppress irrelevant bindings while preserving the pretrained backbone and standard sampling process, requiring no external supervision or inference-time editing.
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Yu Chang, Jiahao Chen, Anzhe Cheng, Paul Bogdan. 2025-09-18. MaskAttn-SDXL: Controllable Region-Level Text-To-Image Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15357
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