EmoCtrl: Controllable Emotional Image Content Generation

An image conveys meaning through both its visual content and emotional tone, jointly shaping human perception. We introduce Controllable Emotional Image Content Generation (C-EICG), which aims to generate images that remain faithful to a given content description while expressing a target emotion. Existing text-to-image models ensure content consistency but lack emotional awareness, whereas emotion-driven models generate affective results at the cost of content distortion. To address this gap, we propose EmoCtrl, supported by a dataset annotated with content, emotion, and affective prompts, bridging abstract emotions to visual cues. EmoCtrl incorporates textual and visual emotion enhancement modules that enrich affective expression via descriptive semantics and perceptual cues. To align with human preference, we further introduce an emotion-driven preference optimization with specifically designed emotion reward. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that EmoCtrl achieves faithful content and expressive emotion control, outperforming existing methods. User studies confirm EmoCtrl's strong alignment with human preference. Moreover, EmoCtrl generalizes well to creative applications, further demonstrating the robustness and adaptability of the learned emotion tokens.