Papers by Sjoerd Van Steenkiste
DreamSync: Aligning Text-to-Image Generation with Image Understanding Feedback (2025.naacl-long)
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Jiao Sun, Deqing Fu, Yushi Hu, Su Wang, Royi Rassin, Da-Cheng Juan, Dana Alon, Charles Herrmann, Sjoerd Van Steenkiste, Ranjay Krishna, Cyrus Rashtchian
| Challenge: | Text-to-Image models (T2I) still struggle to produce images that are both aesthetically pleasing and faithful to the user’s input text. |
| Approach: | They propose a training algorithm that trains T2I models to be faithful to the input text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves both the semantic alignment and aesthetic appeal of two diffusion-based T2I models, evidenced by multiple benchmarks (+1.7% on TIFA, +2.9% on DSG1K, +3.4% on VILA aesthetic). |
CulturalFrames: Assessing Cultural Expectation Alignment in Text-to-Image Models and Evaluation Metrics (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shravan Nayak, Mehar Bhatia, Xiaofeng Zhang, Verena Rieser, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Sjoerd Van Steenkiste, Yash Goyal, Karolina Stanczak, Aishwarya Agrawal
| Challenge: | CulturalFrames is a benchmark designed for rigorous human evaluation of cultural representation in visual generations. |
| Approach: | They propose to quantify the alignment of T2I models and evaluation metrics with respect to both explicit (stated) and implicit (unstated, implied by the prompt’s cultural context) cultural expectations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 983 prompts, 3637 images and 10k human annotations from 10 countries and 5 socio-cultural domains. |