Shape-Guided Diffusion with Inside-Outside Attention

Shape can specify key object constraints, yet existing text-to-image diffusion models ignore this cue and synthesize objects that are incorrectly scaled, cut off, or replaced with background content. We propose a training-free method, Shape-Guided Diffusion, which uses a novel Inside-Outside Attention mechanism to constrain the cross-attention (and self-attention) maps such that prompt tokens (and pixels) referring to the inside of the shape cannot attend outside the shape, and vice versa. To demonstrate the efficacy of our method, we propose a new image editing task where the model must replace an object specified by its mask and a text prompt. We curate a new ShapePrompts benchmark based on MS-COCO and achieve SOTA results in shape faithfulness, text alignment, and realism according to both quantitative metrics and human preferences. Our data and code will be made available at https://shape-guided-diffusion.github.io.