The Chosen One: Consistent Characters in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: Limitations and Conclusions

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18 Jul 2024

Authors:

(1) Omri Avrahami, Google Research and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem;

(2) Amir Hertz, Google Research;

(3) Yael Vinker, Google Research and Tel Aviv University;

(4) Moab Arar, Google Research and Tel Aviv University;

(5) Shlomi Fruchter, Google Research;

(6) Ohad Fried, Reichman University;

(7) Daniel Cohen-Or, Google Research and Tel Aviv University;

(8) Dani Lischinski, Google Research and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

5. Limitations and Conclusions

We found our method to suffer from the following limitations: (a) Inconsistent identity — in some cases, our method is not able to converge to a fully consistent identity (without overfitting). As demonstrated in Figure 8(a), when trying to generate a portrait of a robot, our method generated robots with slightly different colors and shapes (e.g., different arms). This may result from a prompt that is too general, for which identity clustering (Section 3.1) is not able to find a sufficiently cohesive set. (b) Inconsistent supporting characters/elements— although our method is able to find a consistent identity for the character described by the input prompt, the identities of other characters, related to the input character (e.g., their pet), might be inconsistent. For example, in Figure 8(b) the input prompt p to our method described only the girl, and when asked to generate the girl with her cat, different cats were generated. In addition, our framework does not support finding multiple concepts concurrently [6]. (c) Spurious attributes — we found that in some cases, our method binds additional attributes, which are not part of the input text prompt, with the final identity of the character. For example, in Figure 8(c), the input text prompt was “a sticker of a ginger cat”, however, our method added green leaves to the generated sticker, even though it was not asked to do so. This stems from the stochastic nature of the text-to-image model — the model added these leaves in some of the stickers generated during the identity clustering stage (Section 3.1), and the stickers containing the leaves happened to form the most cohesive set ccohesive. (d) Significant computational cost — each iteration of our method involves generating a large number of images, and learning the identity of the most cohesive cluster. It takes about 20 minutes to converge into a consistent identity. Reducing the computational costs is an appealing direction for further research.

Figure 8. Limitations. Our method suffers from the following limitations: (a) in some cases, our method is not able to converge to a fully consistent identity — notice slight color and arm shape changes. (b) Our method is not able to associate a consistent identity to a supporting character that may appear with the main extracted character, for example our method generates different cats for the same girl. (c) Our method sometimes adds spurious attributes to the character, that were not present in the text prompt. For example, it learns to associate green leaves with the cat sticker.

In conclusion, in this paper we offered the first fully-automated solution to the problem of consistent character generation. We hope that our work will pave the way for future advancements, as we believe this technology of consistent character generation may have a disruptive effect on numerous sectors, including education, storytelling, entertainment, fashion, brand design, advertising, and more.

Acknowledgments. We thank Yael Pitch, Matan Cohen, Neal Wadhwa and Yaron Brodsky for their valuable help and feedback.

This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED license.