  The recently rising markup-to-image generation poses greater challenges as
compared to natural image generation, due to its low tolerance for errors as
well as the complex sequence and context correlations between markup and
rendered image. This paper proposes a novel model named "Contrast-augmented
Diffusion Model with Fine-grained Sequence Alignment" (FSA-CDM), which
introduces contrastive positive/negative samples into the diffusion model to
boost performance for markup-to-image generation. Technically, we design a
fine-grained cross-modal alignment module to well explore the sequence
similarity between the two modalities for learning robust feature
representations. To improve the generalization ability, we propose a
contrast-augmented diffusion model to explicitly explore positive and negative
samples by maximizing a novel contrastive variational objective, which is
mathematically inferred to provide a tighter bound for the model's
optimization. Moreover, the context-aware cross attention module is developed
to capture the contextual information within markup language during the
denoising process, yielding better noise prediction results. Extensive
experiments are conducted on four benchmark datasets from different domains,
and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
components in FSA-CDM, significantly exceeding state-of-the-art performance by
about 2%-12% DTW improvements. The code will be released at
https://github.com/zgj77/FSACDM.
