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Main Authors: Butt, Muhammad Atif, Hernandez, Diego, Gomez-Villa, Alexandra, Wang, Kai, Vazquez-Corral, Javier, Van De Weijer, Joost
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13547
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author Butt, Muhammad Atif
Hernandez, Diego
Gomez-Villa, Alexandra
Wang, Kai
Vazquez-Corral, Javier
Van De Weijer, Joost
author_facet Butt, Muhammad Atif
Hernandez, Diego
Gomez-Villa, Alexandra
Wang, Kai
Vazquez-Corral, Javier
Van De Weijer, Joost
contents Text-to-image diffusion models excel at generating images from natural language descriptions, yet fail to interpret numerical colors such as hex codes (#FF5733) and RGB values (rgb(255,87,51)). This limitation stems from subword tokenization, which fragments color codes into semantically meaningless tokens that text encoders cannot map to coherent color representations. We present NumColor, that enables precise numerical color control across multiple diffusion architectures. NumColor comprises two components: a Color Token Aggregator that detects color specifications regardless of tokenization, and a ColorBook containing 6,707 learnable embeddings that map colors to embedding space of text encoder in perceptually uniform CIE Lab space. We introduce two auxiliary losses, directional alignment and interpolation consistency, to enforce geometric correspondence between Lab and embedding spaces, enabling smooth color interpolation. To train the ColorBook, we construct NumColor-Data, a synthetic dataset of 500K rendered images with unambiguous color-to-pixel correspondence, eliminating the annotation ambiguity inherent in photographic datasets. Although trained solely on FLUX, NumColor transfers zero-shot to SD3, SD3.5, PixArt-α, and PixArt-Σ without model-specific adaptation. NumColor improves numerical color accuracy by 4-9x across five models, while simultaneously improving color harmony scores by 10-30x on GenColorBench benchmark.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_13547
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NumColor: Precise Numeric Color Control in Text-to-Image Generation
Butt, Muhammad Atif
Hernandez, Diego
Gomez-Villa, Alexandra
Wang, Kai
Vazquez-Corral, Javier
Van De Weijer, Joost
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Text-to-image diffusion models excel at generating images from natural language descriptions, yet fail to interpret numerical colors such as hex codes (#FF5733) and RGB values (rgb(255,87,51)). This limitation stems from subword tokenization, which fragments color codes into semantically meaningless tokens that text encoders cannot map to coherent color representations. We present NumColor, that enables precise numerical color control across multiple diffusion architectures. NumColor comprises two components: a Color Token Aggregator that detects color specifications regardless of tokenization, and a ColorBook containing 6,707 learnable embeddings that map colors to embedding space of text encoder in perceptually uniform CIE Lab space. We introduce two auxiliary losses, directional alignment and interpolation consistency, to enforce geometric correspondence between Lab and embedding spaces, enabling smooth color interpolation. To train the ColorBook, we construct NumColor-Data, a synthetic dataset of 500K rendered images with unambiguous color-to-pixel correspondence, eliminating the annotation ambiguity inherent in photographic datasets. Although trained solely on FLUX, NumColor transfers zero-shot to SD3, SD3.5, PixArt-α, and PixArt-Σ without model-specific adaptation. NumColor improves numerical color accuracy by 4-9x across five models, while simultaneously improving color harmony scores by 10-30x on GenColorBench benchmark.
title NumColor: Precise Numeric Color Control in Text-to-Image Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13547