Instant Preference Alignment for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models.

Abstract

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has greatly enhanced creative expression, yet achieving preference-aligned generation in a real-time and training-free manner remains challenging. Previous methods often rely on static, pre-collected preferences or fine-tuning, limiting adaptability to evolving and nuanced user intents. In this paper, we highlight the need for instant preference-aligned T2I generation and propose a training-free framework grounded in multimodal large language model (MLLM) priors. Our framework decouples the task into two components: preference understanding and preferenceguided generation. For preference understanding, we leverage MLLMs to automatically extract global preference signals from a reference image and enrich a given prompt using structured instruction design. Our approach supports broader and more fine-grained coverage of user preferences than existing methods. For preference-guided generation, we integrate global keywordbased control and local region-aware cross-attention modulation to steer the diffusion model without additional training, enabling precise alignment across both global attributes and local elements. The entire framework supports multi-round interactive refinement, facilitating real-time and context-aware image generation. Extensive experiments on the Viper dataset and our collected benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms prior approaches in both quantitative metrics and human evaluations, and opens up new possibilities for dialogbased generation and MLLM-diffusion integration.