  Text-to-image diffusion models are well-known for their ability to generate
realistic images based on textual prompts. However, the existing works have
predominantly focused on English, lacking support for non-English text-to-image
models. The most commonly used translation methods cannot solve the generation
problem related to language culture, while training from scratch on a specific
language dataset is prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we are inspired to
propose a simple plug-and-play language transfer method based on knowledge
distillation. All we need to do is train a lightweight MLP-like
parameter-efficient adapter (PEA) with only 6M parameters under teacher
knowledge distillation along with a small parallel data corpus. We are
surprised to find that freezing the parameters of UNet can still achieve
remarkable performance on the language-specific prompt evaluation set,
demonstrating that PEA can stimulate the potential generation ability of the
original UNet. Additionally, it closely approaches the performance of the
English text-to-image model on a general prompt evaluation set. Furthermore,
our adapter can be used as a plugin to achieve significant results in
downstream tasks in cross-lingual text-to-image generation. Code will be
available at: https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/PEA-Diffusion
