OccluRank: Controllable Occlusion-Aware Layout-to-Image Generation by Adding Just an Ordinal Rank
Layout-to-image generation enables explicit spatial control through bounding-box layouts, yet bounding boxes specify only instance locations and cannot represent their occlusion order. Existing methods may rely on additional geometric conditions, employ complex inference procedures, or aggregate independently constructed instance representations without explicitly modeling their occlusion-dependent interactions. We propose OccluRank, a simple and controllable occlusion-aware layout-to-image framework that augments each bounding box with only one ordinal rank. OccluRank encodes the user-specified occlusion order through lightweight rank-based conditioning and introduces an Order-aware Instance Interaction (OII) module to jointly update rank-conditioned instance representations before aggregation. This allows the specified order to guide information exchange among occluding instances without additional geometric inputs or specialized inference-time optimization. We further construct OccluLayout, a synthetic training dataset whose occlusion order and amodal annotations are derived directly from known scene geometry rather than estimated from partially occluded images using auxiliary prediction models. For comprehensive evaluation, we introduce OccluLayout-Bench, which uses multiple multimodal large language model evaluators to assess instance presence, spatial layout, attributes, and occlusion order, together with FID for overall image quality. Experiments show that OccluRank more reliably preserves target instances, follows specified layouts, and realizes desired occlusion relationships while maintaining comparable attribute consistency and overall image quality.