FreeControl: Training-Free Spatial Control of Any Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Any Condition

Abstract

Recent approaches such as ControlNet [59] offer users fine-grained spatial control over text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. However, auxiliary modules have to be trained for each spatial condition type, model architecture, and checkpoint, putting them at odds with the diverse intents and preferences a human designer would like to convey to the AI models during the content creation process. In this work, we present FreeControl, a training-free approach for controllable T2I generation that supports multiple conditions, architectures, and checkpoints simultaneously. Free Control enforces structure guidance to facilitate the global alignment with a guidance image, and appearance guidance to collect visual details from images generated without control. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superior performance of Free Control across a variety of pre-trained T2I models. In particular, FreeControl enables convenient training-free control over many different architectures and checkpoints, allows the challenging input conditions on which most of the existing training-free methods fail, and achieves competitive synthesis quality compared to training-based approaches. Project page: https://genforce.github.io/freecontrol/.