Color Alignment in Diffusion

CVPR 2025

1Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2Trinity College Dublin, 3Deakin University
An overview of our method


Color alignment in Diffusion maps the diffused colors to conditional colors across diffusion steps, enabling a continuous pathway for data synthesis towards a target color pattern while preserving the creative power of diffusion models.

Abstract

Diffusion models have shown great promise in synthesizing visually appealing images. However, it remains challenging to condition the synthesis at a fine-grained level, for instance, synthesizing image pixels following some generic color pattern. Existing image synthesis methods often produce contents that fall outside the desired pixel conditions. To address this, we introduce a novel color alignment algorithm that confines the generative process in diffusion models within a given color pattern. Specifically, we project diffusion terms, either imagery samples or latent representations, into a conditional color space to align with the input color distribution. This strategy simplifies the prediction in diffusion models within a color manifold while still allowing plausible structures in generated contents, thus enabling the generation of diverse contents that comply with the target color pattern. Experimental results demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance in conditioning and controlling of color pixels, while maintaining on-par generation quality and diversity in comparison with regular diffusion models.


Color-aligned Generation on Manual Drawing Conditions

Results on manual drawing conditions.

View additional results and baseline comparisons below.
More can be found in the supplementary zip file.


Color-aligned Generation on In-the-wild Image Conditions

Results on in-the-wild image conditions.

View additional results and baseline comparisons below.
More can be found in the supplementary zip file.


Possible Editing Flows

Editing examples

BibTeX

@InProceedings{shum2025coloralignmentdiffusion,
    author    = {Shum, Ka Chun and Hua, Binh-Son and Nguyen, Duc Thanh and Yeung, Sai-Kit},
    title     = {Color Alignment in Diffusion},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2025}
}