We demonstrate text as a strong cross-modal interface. Rather than relying on
deep embeddings to connect image and language as the interface representation,
our approach represents an image as text, from which we enjoy the
interpretability and flexibility inherent to natural language. We employ an
autoencoder that uses a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model for decoding.
The encoder is trained to transform an input image into text, which is then fed
into the fixed text-to-image diffusion decoder to reconstruct the original
input -- a process we term De-Diffusion. Experiments validate both the
precision and comprehensiveness of De-Diffusion text representing images, such
that it can be readily ingested by off-the-shelf text-to-image tools and LLMs
for diverse multi-modal tasks. For example, a single De-Diffusion model can
generalize to provide transferable prompts for different text-to-image tools,
and also achieves a new state of the art on open-ended vision-language tasks by
simply prompting large language models with few-shot examples.

我们展示了一种以文本作为强大的跨模态接口的方法，通过将图像表示为文本，利用自然语言的可解释性和灵活性，我们使用一个自动编码器，将输入图像转换为文本，并通过固定的文本到图像扩散解码器进行重构，该过程称为 De-Diffusion。实验证实了 De-Diffusion 文本表示图像的精确性和综合性，使其可以轻松地被一般的文本到图像工具和 LLMs 接收，并可用于多样化的多模态任务。