MuLan: Adapting Multilingual Diffusion Models for Hundreds of Languages with Negligible Cost

Sen Xing, Muyan Zhong, Zeqiang Lai, Liangchen Li, Jiawen Liu +3 more
2/12/2026

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Abstract

In this work, we explore a cost-effective framework for multilingual image generation. We find that, unlike models tuned on high-quality images with multilingual annotations, leveraging text encoders pre-trained on widely available, noisy Internet image-text pairs significantly enhances data efficiency in text-to-image (T2I) generation across multiple languages.Based on this insight, we introduce MuLan, Multi-Language adapter, a lightweight language adapter with fewer than 20M parameters, trained alongside a frozen text encoder and image diffusion model. Compared to previous multilingual T2I models, this framework offers: (1) Cost efficiency. Using readily accessible English data and off-the-shelf multilingual text encoders minimizes the training cost; (2) High performance. Achieving comparable generation capabilities in over 110 languages with CLIP similarity scores nearly matching those in English (39.57 for English vs. 39.61 for other languages); and (3) Broad applicability. Seamlessly integrating with compatible community tools like LoRA, LCM, ControlNet, and IP-Adapter, expanding its potential use cases.

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Cite this paper

@article{xing2026mulan,
  title  = {MuLan: Adapting Multilingual Diffusion Models for Hundreds of Languages with Negligible Cost},
  author = {Sen Xing and Muyan Zhong and Zeqiang Lai and Liangchen Li and Jiawen Liu and Yaohui Wang and Jifeng Dai and Wenhai Wang},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2412.01271},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.01271},
  journal = {ICML 2024 2024}
}

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