From Structural Feedback to Prompt Policies: Learning Faithful Text-to-Image Prompt Editors

Abstract

Prompt optimization should improve the image a user receives without changing the scene the user requested. Yet stylistic rewriting can weaken object attributes and relations even when global text--image similarity remains high. We propose StruPO, a structure-aware prompt editor that uses a calibrated scene graph as a shared representation for policy conditioning and image-grounded supervision. The graph exposes what should be preserved, while deletion, reordering, and insertion provide a token-aligned way to modify the prompt. This turns structural feedback from an external critique into a training signal for a reusable editing policy. Learning from that signal requires handling both uncertain grounding and stochastic image generation. StruPO retains grounding confidence through smooth reward shaping and averages multiple images for each edit before computing group-relative advantages. Experiments span three disjoint 2K-prompt test sets and four frozen generation backbones, with comparisons to learned prompt optimizers, iterative structural feedback, diffusion-model fine-tuning, and inference-time attention control. StruPO improves the faithfulness--aesthetics trade-off, with consistent gains in relational fidelity. Independent automatic evaluators and a 15-annotator study provide complementary evidence, and human preference margins increase with relation complexity. Controlled ablations connect these gains to graph conditioning, local editing, and image-grounded learning. The resulting policy produces reusable optimized text in one pass after graph calibration, without an iterative critique--rewrite loop.