Intermediate Text Representation Guided Text-to-Image Generation for Enhancing One-and-Only Alignment

Soyoun Won, Aryan Yazdan Parast, Basim Azam, Jean Honorio, Naveed Akhtar

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models often fail to faithfully render explicit textual descriptions, instead defaulting to strongly learned visual priors due to a phenomenon referred to as concept association bias. We show that such bias is particularly strong for one-and-only (OAO) objects, entities that exist in a single canonical form, such as celestial bodies, landmarks, and artworks. The deeply ingrained visual identity for these concepts often resists modification through prompting alone. Addressing this challenge, we first identify through an information-theoretic analysis that the final text embedding discards concept-level information present in the intermediate-layer text representations, reducing the mutual information available to the subsequent denoising process. We then propose Intermediate Text Representation (IR)-guided diffusion, which injects intermediate hidden states of the text encoder into the conditioning signal during early denoising steps, recovering suppressed concepts without any additional training, optimization, or external models. To systematically evaluate the challenging task of aligning generative outputs with unusual prompts for OAO objects, we introduce OAO-AttackBench, a benchmark comprising counterfactual prompts that directly conflict with the core visual identity of OAO objects. Experiments on four benchmarks, including OAO-AttackBench, show that our method achieves up to a 19.1 percentage-point improvement in VQAScore while preserving generation fidelity and human preference. Project page: https://soyoun-won.github.io/one-and-only-ir-guidance/.