D2D: Detector-to-Differentiable Critic for Improved Numeracy in
  Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: name: Nobline Yoo; name: Olga Russakovsky; name: Ye Zhu
Published: 2025-10-22 06:27:05

Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have achieved strong performance in
semantic alignment, yet they still struggle with generating the correct number
of objects specified in prompts. Existing approaches typically incorporate
auxiliary counting networks as external critics to enhance numeracy. However,
since these critics must provide gradient guidance during generation, they are
restricted to regression-based models that are inherently differentiable, thus
excluding detector-based models with superior counting ability, whose
count-via-enumeration nature is non-differentiable. To overcome this
limitation, we propose Detector-to-Differentiable (D2D), a novel framework that
transforms non-differentiable detection models into differentiable critics,
thereby leveraging their superior counting ability to guide numeracy
generation. Specifically, we design custom activation functions to convert
detector logits into soft binary indicators, which are then used to optimize
the noise prior at inference time with pre-trained T2I models. Our extensive
experiments on SDXL-Turbo, SD-Turbo, and Pixart-DMD across four benchmarks of
varying complexity (low-density, high-density, and multi-object scenarios)
demonstrate consistent and substantial improvements in object counting accuracy
(e.g., boosting up to 13.7% on D2D-Small, a 400-prompt, low-density benchmark),
with minimal degradation in overall image quality and computational overhead.