Towards Language-Free Training for Text-to-Image Generation

One of the major challenges in training text-to-image generation models is the need of a large number of high-quality text-image pairs. While image samples are often easily accessible, the associated text description typically requires careful human captioning, which is particularly time- and cost-consuming. In this paper, we propose the first work to train text-to-image generation models without any text data. It intelligently leverages the well-aligned cross-modal semantic space of the powerful pre-trained CLIP model: the requirement of text-conditioning is alleviated via generating text features from image features. Extensive experiments are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We obtain state-of-the-art results in the standard text-to-image generation tasks. Importantly, the proposed language-free model outperforms most existing models trained with full text-image pairs. Furthermore, our method can be applied in fine-tuning pre-trained models, which saves both training time and cost in training text-to-image generation models. Our pre-trained model obtains competitive results in zero-shot text-to-image generation on MS-COCO dataset, yet with around only 1% of the model size compared to the recently proposed large DALL-E model.