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Main Authors: Zhao, Yaqi, Wang, Xiaochen, Dong, Li, Zhang, Wentao, Yuan, Yuhui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11117
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author Zhao, Yaqi
Wang, Xiaochen
Dong, Li
Zhang, Wentao
Yuan, Yuhui
author_facet Zhao, Yaqi
Wang, Xiaochen
Dong, Li
Zhang, Wentao
Yuan, Yuhui
contents Numerosity remains a challenge for state-of-the-art text-to-image generation models like FLUX and GPT-4o, which often fail to accurately follow counting instructions in text prompts. In this paper, we aim to study a fundamental yet often overlooked question: Can diffusion models inherently generate the correct number of objects specified by a textual prompt simply by scaling up the dataset and model size? To enable rigorous and reproducible evaluation, we construct a clean synthetic numerosity benchmark comprising two complementary datasets: GrayCount250 for controlled scaling studies, and NaturalCount6 featuring complex naturalistic scenes. Second, we empirically show that the scaling hypothesis does not hold: larger models and datasets alone fail to improve counting accuracy on our benchmark. Our analysis identifies a key reason: diffusion models tend to rely heavily on the noise initialization rather than the explicit numerosity specified in the prompt. We observe that noise priors exhibit biases toward specific object counts. In addition, we propose an effective strategy for controlling numerosity by injecting count-aware layout information into the noise prior. Our method achieves significant gains, improving accuracy on GrayCount250 from 20.0\% to 85.3\% and on NaturalCount6 from 74.8\% to 86.3\%, demonstrating effective generalization across settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_11117
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Demystifying Numerosity in Diffusion Models -- Limitations and Remedies
Zhao, Yaqi
Wang, Xiaochen
Dong, Li
Zhang, Wentao
Yuan, Yuhui
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Numerosity remains a challenge for state-of-the-art text-to-image generation models like FLUX and GPT-4o, which often fail to accurately follow counting instructions in text prompts. In this paper, we aim to study a fundamental yet often overlooked question: Can diffusion models inherently generate the correct number of objects specified by a textual prompt simply by scaling up the dataset and model size? To enable rigorous and reproducible evaluation, we construct a clean synthetic numerosity benchmark comprising two complementary datasets: GrayCount250 for controlled scaling studies, and NaturalCount6 featuring complex naturalistic scenes. Second, we empirically show that the scaling hypothesis does not hold: larger models and datasets alone fail to improve counting accuracy on our benchmark. Our analysis identifies a key reason: diffusion models tend to rely heavily on the noise initialization rather than the explicit numerosity specified in the prompt. We observe that noise priors exhibit biases toward specific object counts. In addition, we propose an effective strategy for controlling numerosity by injecting count-aware layout information into the noise prior. Our method achieves significant gains, improving accuracy on GrayCount250 from 20.0\% to 85.3\% and on NaturalCount6 from 74.8\% to 86.3\%, demonstrating effective generalization across settings.
title Demystifying Numerosity in Diffusion Models -- Limitations and Remedies
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11117