Cyrus Rashtchian


2025

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DreamSync: Aligning Text-to-Image Generation with Image Understanding Feedback
Jiao Sun | Deqing Fu | Yushi Hu | Su Wang | Royi Rassin | Da-Cheng Juan | Dana Alon | Charles Herrmann | Sjoerd Van Steenkiste | Ranjay Krishna | Cyrus Rashtchian
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Despite their widespread success, Text-to-Image models (T2I) still struggle to produce images that are both aesthetically pleasing and faithful to the user’s input text. We introduce DreamSync, a simple yet effective training algorithm that improves T2I models to be faithful to the text input. DreamSync utilizes large vision-language models (VLMs) to effectively identify the fine-grained discrepancies between generated images and the text inputs and enable T2I models to self-improve without labeled data. First, it prompts the model to generate several candidate images for a given input text. Then, it uses two VLMs to select the best generation: a Visual Question Answering model that measures the alignment of generated images to the text, and another that measures the generation’s aesthetic quality. After selection, we use LoRA to iteratively finetune the T2I model to guide its generation towards the selected best generations. DreamSync does not need any additional human annotation, model architecture changes, or reinforcement learning. Despite its simplicity, DreamSync 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) and human evaluation shows that DreamSync improves text rendering compared to SDXL by 18.5% on DSG1K benchmark.

2010

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Collecting Image Annotations Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
Cyrus Rashtchian | Peter Young | Micah Hodosh | Julia Hockenmaier
Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

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Cross-Caption Coreference Resolution for Automatic Image Understanding
Micah Hodosh | Peter Young | Cyrus Rashtchian | Julia Hockenmaier
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning