Systems and methods for text-to-image generation using language models

Embodiments described herein provide a mechanism for replacing existing text encoders in text-to-image generation models with more powerful pre-trained language models. Specifically, a translation network is trained to map features from the pre-trained language model output into the space of the target text encoder. The training preserves the rich structure of the pre-trained language model while allowing it to operate within the text-to-image generation model. The resulting modularized text-to-image model receives prompt and generates an image representing the features contained in the prompt.