Papers › LAFITE: Towards Language-Free Training for Text-to-Image Generation

LAFITE: Towards Language-Free Training for Text-to-Image Generation

27 Nov 2021arXiv:2111.13792archive 2025-07-28

Yufan Zhou, Ruiyi Zhang, Changyou Chen, Chunyuan Li, Chris Tensmeyer, Tong Yu, Jiuxiang Gu, Jinhui Xu, Tong Sun

One of the major challenges in training text-to-image generation models is the need of a large number of high-quality image-text pairs. While image samples are often easily accessible, the associated text descriptions typically require careful human captioning, which is particularly time- and cost-consuming. In this paper, we propose the first work to train text-to-image generation models without any text data. Our method leverages the well-aligned multi-modal semantic space of the powerful pre-trained CLIP model: the requirement of text-conditioning is seamlessly alleviated via generating text features from image features. Extensive experiments are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We obtain state-of-the-art results in the standard text-to-image generation tasks. Importantly, the proposed language-free model outperforms most existing models trained with full image-text pairs. Furthermore, our method can be applied in fine-tuning pre-trained models, which saves both training time and cost in training text-to-image generation models. Our pre-trained model obtains competitive results in zero-shot text-to-image generation on the MS-COCO dataset, yet with around only 1% of the model size and training data size relative to the recently proposed large DALL-E model.

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drboog/Lafite officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
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Tasks

Image GenerationText to Image GenerationText-to-Image GenerationZero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Text-to-Image Generation COCO (Common Objects in Context) Lafite FID 8.12 #20 of 69 Archive leaderboard report
Text-to-Image Generation COCO (Common Objects in Context) Lafite Inception score 32.34 #20 of 69 Archive leaderboard report
Text-to-Image Generation COCO (Common Objects in Context) Lafite SOA-C 61.09 #20 of 69 Archive leaderboard report
Text-to-Image Generation COCO (Common Objects in Context) Lafite (zero-shot) FID 26.94 #52 of 69 Archive leaderboard report
Text-to-Image Generation COCO (Common Objects in Context) Lafite (zero-shot) FID-1 22.97 #52 of 69 Archive leaderboard report
Text-to-Image Generation COCO (Common Objects in Context) Lafite (zero-shot) FID-2 18.70 #52 of 69 Archive leaderboard report
Text-to-Image Generation COCO (Common Objects in Context) Lafite (zero-shot) FID-4 15.72 #52 of 69 Archive leaderboard report
Text-to-Image Generation COCO (Common Objects in Context) Lafite (zero-shot) FID-8 14.79 #52 of 69 Archive leaderboard report
Text-to-Image Generation COCO (Common Objects in Context) Lafite (zero-shot) Inception score 26.02 #52 of 69 Archive leaderboard report
Text-to-Image Generation CUB Lafite FID 10.48 #7 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-to-Image Generation CUB Lafite Inception score 5.97 #7 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-to-Image Generation Multi-Modal-CelebA-HQ Lafite FID 12.54 #2 of 10 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

CLIP

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