Images Talk Back: Guiding MMDiTs by Suppressing Image-to-Text Feedback

Abstract

Multimodal diffusion transformers (MMDiTs) allow the evolving image to update internal text representations through joint attention. These representations then guide subsequent image updates, raising a question: does this feedback help correct deviations from the prompt, or preserve them? We find that image-to-text (I2T) feedback can preserve the objects and attributes already represented in the evolving image, including errors. Transplanting I2T messages can rescue failures or disrupt successes. At matched intervention strengths, suppressing the influence of I2T feedback improves generation, whereas opposite controls degrade it. These findings motivate Semantic Feedback Guidance (SFG), which suppresses the influence of I2T feedback by guiding away from an auxiliary branch that strengthens this feedback and weakens text-to-image conditioning. The in-place variant, iSFG, directly suppresses I2T feedback and strengthens text-to-image conditioning, requiring no extra model evaluations. Temporal interventions motivate running the SFG branch during the first 20% of image sampling steps, requiring about $1.2\times$ the base NFE without classifier-free guidance (CFG). Experiments across three image-generation backbones show gains in alignment and preference-model scores. On FLUX, adding SFG to CFG raises GenEval from $0.6661$ to $0.7479$; on SD3.5M, iSFG adds $+1.33$ HPSv2.1 over CFG at zero extra NFE. The control also transfers to text-to-video and image-to-video generation, improving VBench scores. Code is available at https://github.com/yyc1215lll-creator/SFG.