BideDPO: Conditional Image Generation with Simultaneous Text and Condition Alignment

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission2913 Authors

Keywords: Diffusion Models, Multimodal Learning, Text-to-Image Generation

Abstract: Conditional image generation augments text-to-image synthesis with structural, spatial, or stylistic priors and is used in many domains. However, current methods struggle to harmonize guidance from both sources when conflicts arise: 1) input-level conflict, where the semantics of the conditioning image contradict the text prompt, and 2) model-bias conflict, where learned generative biases hinder alignment even when the condition and text are compatible. These scenarios demand nuanced, case-by-case trade-offs that standard supervised fine-tuning struggles to deliver. Preference-based optimization techniques, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), offer a promising solution but remain limited: naive DPO suffers from gradient entanglement between text and condition signals and lacks disentangled, conflict-aware training data for multi-constraint tasks. To overcome these issues, we propose a self-driven, bidirectionally decoupled DPO framework (BideDPO). At its core, our method constructs two disentangled preference pairs for each sample—one for the condition and one for the text—to mitigate gradient entanglement. The influence of these pairs is then managed by an Adaptive Loss Balancing strategy for balanced optimization. To generate these pairs, we introduce an automated data pipeline that iteratively samples from the model and uses vision-language model checks to create disentangled, conflict-aware data. Finally, this entire process is embedded within an iterative optimization strategy that progressively refines both the model and the data. We construct a DualAlign benchmark to evaluate a model’s ability to resolve conflicts between text and condition, and experiments on commonly used modalities show that BideDPO delivers substantial gains in both text success rate (e.g., +35\%) and condition adherence. We also validated the robustness of our approach on the widely used COCO dataset. All models, code, and benchmarks will be released to support future work.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 2913