ResearchResearch paperImage, Video & 3D Generation1 source · Oct 21, 2026

Spatially Gated Demographic Steering for Debiasing Multi-Person Text-to-Image Generation

We present Spatially Gated Steering (SGS), which steers the demographics of each person independently by extracting per-person masks from the Diffusion Transformer's (DiT) internal attention maps at a critical denoising timestep and applying a distinct demographic vector within each mask for the remaining steps.

Key points

  • Text-to-Image models reproduce societal stereotypes, and existing mitigation applies one demographic correction to the whole scene.
  • In multi-person scene generation this creates a trade-off: global steering improves aggregate balance only by homogenizing the people within an image.
  • Steering-based methods like Embedding Arithmetic drive the intra-image diversity below the unsteered baseline.
  • On skewed occupational prompts, SGS reaches high intra-image racial and gender diversity while keeping aggregate balance competitive and image quality near baseline, a result we validate on two architecturally distinct diffusion transformers, FLUX.1-Dev and SD3.5-Large.

Sources (1)

  • [1]Spatially Gated Demographic Steering for Debiasing Multi-Person Text-to-Image Generation
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 21, 12:32 PM
    We present Spatially Gated Steering (SGS), which steers the demographics of each person independently by extracting per-person masks from the Diffusion Transformer's (DiT) internal attention maps at a critical denoising timestep and applying a distinct demographic vector within each mask for the remaining steps.
    Text-to-Image models reproduce societal stereotypes, and existing mitigation applies one demographic correction to the whole scene.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

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