Instruct-Imagen: Image Generation with Multi-modal Instruction
Authors: Hexiang Hu, Kelvin C.K. Chan, Yu-Chuan Su, Wenhu Chen, Yandong Li, Kihyuk Sohn, Yang Zhao, Xue Ben, Boqing Gong, William Cohen, Ming-Wei Chang, Xuhui Jia

This paper presents Instruct-Imagen a model that tackles heterogeneous image generation tasks and generalizes across unseen tasks. We introduce multi-modal instruction for image generation a task representation articulating a range of generation intents with precision. It uses natural language to amalgamate disparate modalities (e.g. text edge style subject etc.) such that abundant generation intents can be standardized in a uniform format. We then build Instruct-Imagen by fine-tuning a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model with two stages. First we adapt the model using the retrieval-augmented training to enhance model's capabilities to ground its generation on external multi-modal context. Subsequently we fine-tune the adapted model on diverse image generation tasks that requires vision-language understanding (e.g. subject-driven generation etc.) each paired with a multi-modal instruction encapsulating the task's essence. Human evaluation on various image generation datasets reveals that Instruct-Imagen matches or surpasses prior task-specific models in-domain and demonstrates promising generalization to unseen and more complex tasks. Our evaluation suite will be made publicly available.