Beyond Pixels: A Cyber-Physical-Social-Thinking Space Based Text-to-Image Generation Review

The rapid advancement of Text-to-Image (T2I) generation technologies has revolutionized visual content creation, yet current research predominantly focuses on technical achievements while overlooking broader systemic implications. This paper introduces the Cyber-Physical-Social-Thinking (CPST) space as a holistic lens for analyzing T2I technologies. We systematically review the evolution from GANs to diffusion models and emerging LLM-based architectures, while critically examining research gaps across physical consistency, social ethics, and cognitive collaboration spaces. Our analysis reveals that while the Cyber dimension has matured significantly, critical challenges persist in ensuring physical plausibility, addressing societal impacts, and enabling genuine human-AI co-creation. We propose a forward-looking research roadmap emphasizing CPST integration, establishing comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, and developing governance frameworks. This work contributes a unified analytical paradigm that transcends purely technical metrics, guiding interdisciplinary innovation toward T2I systems that enhance human capabilities across all four spaces.