This survey reviews 490 papers on text‑to‑image synthesis (T2I) over the past decade, covering key model families such as GANs, autoregressive models, and diffusion models. It organizes recent research by problem areas—controllability, personalization, editing, preference alignment, efficiency, safety, and spatial consistency—rather than strictly chronologically. The paper also examines unified multimodal models, datasets, evaluation metrics, and discusses applications, challenges, and future research directions in T2I.
By Nonghai Zhang, Hao Tang
arXiv:2605. 18714v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) strive to consolidate visual understanding and visual generation within a single architecture.
By Songsong Yu, Yuxin Chen, Ying Shan, Yanwei Li
arXiv:2510.12041v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have achieved impressive results, yet existing models often struggle with simple or underspecifie...
By Ruibo Chen, Jiacheng Pan, Heng Huang, Zhenheng Yang
arXiv:2609.08282v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Unified multimodal models can generate images and interpret them, but their two capabilities are usually optimized with separate supervision. We in...
By Ke Hao, Yuanzhi Liang, Tingxi Chen, Rui Li, Haibin Huang, Chi Zhang, Yun Gu, Xuelong Li
arXiv:2607. 07117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In text-to-image in-context learning (T2I-ICL), a model has to infer a latent compositional pattern from fewshot demonstrations for generating a query image.
By Stepanida Alekseeva, Jenifer Kalafatovich, Seong-Whan Lee
arXiv:2509. 24900v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The performance of unified multimodal models for image generation and editing is fundamentally constrained by the quality and comprehensiveness of their training data.
By Zhihong Chen, Xuehai Bai, Yang Shi, Chaoyou Fu, Huanyu Zhang, Haotian Wang, Xiaoyan Sun, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Yi-Fan Zhang
The paper introduces a capability‑centric data infrastructure for generalist image generation, integrating task‑specific supervision with a curriculum that aligns with the dependencies among generative capabilities. It employs three interoperable data engines—text‑image grounding, inter‑image transformation, and image‑knowledge association—alongside caption experts to harmonize text‑to‑image and editing supervision. The system curates massive corpora (440M T2I images, 120M editing pairs, 27M image‑entity pairs) and trains multimodal diffusion models (3B and 6B parameters) from scratch, achieving broad visual coverage and versatile rendering as shown by CPI‑Bench and qualitative tests.
By Xingjian Wang, Zhao Wang, Taihang Hu, Jun Zheng, Qing Jin, Qinye Zhou, Zhengtao Wu, Yongchao Du, Zuan Gao, Chao Lin, Yefeng Shen, Xiaoli Xu, Zhengze Xu, Hao Yan, Yuhang Yu, Mingzhou Zhang, Mengting Chen
UReason is a benchmark that evaluates how well unified multimodal models (UMMs) align textual reasoning with image generation. It contains 2,000 human‑curated instances across five reasoning‑intensive tasks—Code, Arithmetic, Spatial, Attribute, and Text—and compares direct generation, reasoning‑guided generation, and decontextualized generation. The study finds that while reasoning‑guided generation improves over direct generation, decontextualized generation consistently outperforms it, indicating that the visual semantics in textual reasoning are not reliably reflected in the generated images.
By Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Huijuan Wang, Ivan Yee Lee, Yong Liu, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
WeAgent-MMGenEdit is a comprehensive framework for multimodal agentic image generation and editing that addresses the unreliability of current models when prompts require external world knowledge. It introduces a multimodal harness with persistent evidence management, a scalable data construction pipeline producing 23K supervised trajectories and 14.7K RL tasks, and a bilingual benchmark (WeBench-MMGenEdit) for knowledge-intensive generation and multi-image editing. Post‑training methods based on SFT and RL further refine the agent policy and image backend, enabling a 30B‑parameter policy to outperform similarly sized models and approach the performance of a 1T‑parameter agent.
By Hui Zhang, Zongkai Liu, Liqiang Niu, Juntao Liu, Han Li, Zhen Cao, Wenchao Chen, Chengduo Zhao, Fandong Meng
ReasonUni introduces a reasoning-augmented reconstructive post‑training framework for unified multimodal models (UMMs) that couples image‑to‑text understanding and text‑to‑image generation. The framework first reasons about the desired edit and its target state, then generates the target image conditioned on this reasoning output. A tree‑structured reinforcement learning method, TreeGRPO, jointly optimizes the reasoning and generation modules, yielding consistent performance gains across multiple benchmarks.
By Feize Wu, Zhiyuan Yan, Yuhuan Hong, Yuwei Niu, Zongjian Li, Zheyuan Liu, Bin Lin, Jinbo Yan, Jie Qin, Xudong Mao, Limeng Qiao, Guanglu Wan, Li Yuan
Text-to-image (T2I) platforms typically return several images per prompt so users can explore different visual interpretations and choose one that matches their intent. However, T2I models are usually...
arXiv:2607. 13125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Boogu-Image-0.
By Guoxuan Chen, Chufeng Xiao, Haoran Yang, Siyue Xie, Binxiao Huang, Ming Zhang, Cheuk Him Chau, Xinyu Fu, Yingzhao Lian, Tom S. Y. Li, Jintao Lin, Bowen Dong, Zian Qian, Yuhao Liu, Yuxuan Hu, Weikang Shi, Bin Zou, Bowen Zheng, Haoxuan Che, Chang Chen, Yuyang He, Heyang Sun, Tianyu Huang, Chong Hou Choi, Cheng Gong, Han Shi, Haoli Bai, Xihui Liu, Hongsheng Li, Qifeng Chen, Chao Huang, Rui Liu, Chenyang Lei