  Recent text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated an astonishing
capacity to generate high-quality images. However, researchers mainly studied
the way of synthesizing images with only text prompts. While some works have
explored using other modalities as conditions, considerable paired data, e.g.,
box/mask-image pairs, and fine-tuning time are required for nurturing models.
As such paired data is time-consuming and labor-intensive to acquire and
restricted to a closed set, this potentially becomes the bottleneck for
applications in an open world. This paper focuses on the simplest form of
user-provided conditions, e.g., box or scribble. To mitigate the aforementioned
problem, we propose a training-free method to control objects and contexts in
the synthesized images adhering to the given spatial conditions. Specifically,
three spatial constraints, i.e., Inner-Box, Outer-Box, and Corner Constraints,
are designed and seamlessly integrated into the denoising step of diffusion
models, requiring no additional training and massive annotated layout data.
Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed constraints can
control what and where to present in the images while retaining the ability of
Diffusion models to synthesize with high fidelity and diverse concept coverage.
The code is publicly available at https://github.com/showlab/BoxDiff.
