COLING 2025main2 citations

Imposter: Text and Frequency Guidance for Subject Driven Action Personalization using Diffusion Models

Divya Kothandaraman, Kuldeep Kulkarni, Sumit Shekhar, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan, Dinesh Manocha

Abstract

We present ImPoster, a novel algorithm for generating a target image of a ‘source’ subject performing a ‘driving’ action. The inputs to our algorithm are a single pair of a source image with the subject that we wish to edit and a driving image with a subject of an arbitrary class performing the driving action, along with the text descriptions of the two images. Our approach is completely unsupervised and does not require any access to additional annotations like keypoints or pose. Our approach builds on a pretrained text-to-image latent diffusion model and learns the characteristics of the source and the driving image by finetuning the diffusion model for a small number of iterations. At inference time, ImPoster performs step-wise text prompting i.e. it denoises by first moving in the direction of the image manifold corresponding to the driving image followed by the direction of the image manifold corresponding to the text description of the desired target image. We propose a novel diffusion guidance formulation, image frequency guidance, to steer the generation towards the manifold of the source subject and the driving action at every step of the inference denoising. Our frequency guidance formulations are derived from the frequency domain properties of images. We extensively evaluate ImPoster on a diverse set of source-driving image pairs to demonstrate improvements over baselines. To the best of our knowledge, ImPoster is the first approach towards achieving both subject-driven as well as action-driven image personalization.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{kothandaraman-etal-2025-imposter,
    title = "Imposter: Text and Frequency Guidance for Subject Driven Action Personalization using Diffusion Models",
    author = "Kothandaraman, Divya  and
      Kulkarni, Kuldeep  and
      Shekhar, Sumit  and
      Srinivasan, Balaji Vasan  and
      Manocha, Dinesh",
    editor = "Rambow, Owen  and
      Wanner, Leo  and
      Apidianaki, Marianna  and
      Al-Khalifa, Hend  and
      Eugenio, Barbara Di  and
      Schockaert, Steven",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.730/",
    pages = "11013--11028"
}
Imposter: Text and Frequency Guidance for Subject Driven Action Personalization using Diffusion Models · COLING 2025