Abstract:With the development of generative adversarial networks (GANs), synthesizing images from textual descriptions has become an active research area. However, textual descriptions used for image generation are often in English, and the generated objects are mostly faces, flowers, birds, etc. Few studies have been conducted on the generation of Chinese paintings with Chinese descriptions. The text-to-image generation often requires an enormous number of labeled image-text pairs, and the cost of dataset production is high. With the advance in multimodal pre-training, the GAN generation process can be guided in an optimized way, which significantly reduces the demand for datasets and computational resources. In this study, a multi-domain vector quatization generative adversarial network (VQGAN) model is proposed to simultaneously generate Chinese paintings in multiple domains. Furthermore, a multimodal pre-trained model WenLan is used to calculate the distance loss between generated images and textual descriptions. The semantic consistency between images and texts is achieved by optimization of the hidden space variables input into multi-domain VQGAN. Finally, an ablation experiment is conducted to compare different variants of multi-domain VQGAN in terms of the FID and R-precision metrics, and a user investigation is carried out. The results demonstrate that the complete multi-domain VQGAN model outperforms the original VQGAN model in terms of image quality and text-image semantic consistency.