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 guidance scale


Diffusion Adaptive Text Embedding for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Text-to-image diffusion models rely on text embeddings from a pre-trained text encoder, but these embeddings remain fixed across all diffusion timesteps, limiting their adaptability to the generative process. We propose Diffusion Adaptive Text Embedding (DATE), which dynamically updates text embeddings at each diffusion timestep based on intermediate perturbed data. We formulate an optimization problem and derive an update rule that refines the text embeddings at each sampling step to improve alignment and preference between the mean predicted image and the text. This allows DATE to dynamically adapts the text conditions to the reverse-diffused images throughout diffusion sampling without requiring additional model training. Through theoretical analysis and empirical results, we show that DATE maintains the generative capability of the model while providing superior text-image alignment over fixed text embeddings across various tasks, including multi-concept generation and text-guided image editing.


Improved Training Technique for Shortcut Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Shortcut models represent a promising, non-adversarial paradigm for generative modeling, uniquely supporting one-step, few-step, and multi-step sampling from a single trained network. However, their widespread adoption has been stymied by critical performance bottlenecks. This paper tackles the five core issues that held shortcut models back: (1) the hidden flaw of compounding guidance, which we are the first to formalize, causing severe image artifacts; (2) inflexible fixed guidance that restricts inference-time control; (3) a pervasive frequency bias driven by a reliance on low-level distances in the direct domain, which biases reconstructions toward low frequencies; (4) divergent self-consistency arising from a conflict with EMA training; and (5) curvy flow trajectories that impede convergence. To address these challenges, we introduce iSM, a unified training framework that systematically resolves each limitation. Our framework is built on four key improvements: Intrinsic Guidance provides explicit, dynamic control over guidance strength, resolving both compounding guidance and inflexibility. A Multi-Level Wavelet Loss mitigates frequency bias to restore high-frequency details. Scaling Optimal Transport (sOT) reduces training variance and learns straighter, more stable generative paths. Finally, a Twin EMA strategy reconciles training stability with self-consistency. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256 ห† 256 demonstrate that our approach yields substantial FID improvements over baseline shortcut models across one-step, few-step, and multi-step generation, making shortcut models a viable and competitive class of generative models.


Feedback Guidance of Diffusion Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

While Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) has become standard for improving sample fidelity in conditional diffusion models, it can harm diversity and induce memorization by applying constant guidance regardless of whether a particular sample needs correction. We propose FeedBack Guidance (FBG), which uses a state-dependent coefficient to self-regulate guidance amounts based on need. Our approach is derived from first principles by assuming the learned conditional distribution is linearly corrupted by the unconditional distribution, contrasting with CFG's implicit multiplicative assumption. Our scheme relies on feedback of its own predictions about the conditional signal informativeness to adapt guidance dynamically during inference, challenging the view of guidance as a fixed hyperparameter. The approach is benchmarked on ImageNet512x512, where it significantly outperforms Classifier-Free Guidance and is competitive to Limited Interval Guidance (LIG) while benefitting from a strong mathematical framework. On Text-To-Image generation, we demonstrate that, as anticipated, our approach automatically applies higher guidance scales for complex prompts than for simpler ones and that it can be easily combined with existing guidance schemes such as CFG or LIG. Our code is available at this link.





Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

The ability to collect a large dataset of human preferences from text-to-image users is usually limited to companies, making such datasets inaccessible to the public. To address this issue, we create a web app that enables text-to-image users to generate images and specify their preferences. Using this web app we build Pick-a-Pic, a large, open dataset of text-to-image prompts and real users'



DPM-Solver-v3: Improved Diffusion ODE Solver with Empirical Model Statistics

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have exhibited excellent performance for high-fidelity image generation while suffering from inefficient sampling. Recent works accelerate the sampling procedure by proposing fast ODE solvers that leverage the specific ODE form of DPMs. However, they highly rely on specific parameterization during inference (such as noise/data prediction), which might not be the optimal choice. In this work, we propose a novel formulation towards the optimal parameterization during sampling that minimizes the first-order discretization error of the ODE solution. Based on such formulation, we propose \textit{DPM-Solver-v3}, a new fast ODE solver for DPMs by introducing several coefficients efficiently computed on the pretrained model, which we call \textit{empirical model statistics}. We further incorporate multistep methods and a predictor-corrector framework, and propose some techniques for improving sample quality at small numbers of function evaluations (NFE) or large guidance scales. Experiments show that DPM-Solver-v3 achieves consistently better or comparable performance in both unconditional and conditional sampling with both pixel-space and latent-space DPMs, especially in 5$\sim$10 NFEs. We achieve FIDs of 12.21 (5 NFE), 2.51 (10 NFE) on unconditional CIFAR10, and MSE of 0.55 (5 NFE, 7.5 guidance scale) on Stable Diffusion, bringing a speed-up of 15\%$\sim$30\% compared to previous state-of-the-art training-free methods.


Improved Mean Flows: On the Challenges of Fastforward Generative Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

MeanFlow (MF) has recently been established as a framework for one-step generative modeling. However, its ``fastforward'' nature introduces key challenges in both the training objective and the guidance mechanism. First, the original MF's training target depends not only on the underlying ground-truth fields but also on the network itself. To address this issue, we recast the objective as a loss on the instantaneous velocity $v$, re-parameterized by a network that predicts the average velocity $u$. Our reformulation yields a more standard regression problem and improves the training stability. Second, the original MF fixes the classifier-free guidance scale during training, which sacrifices flexibility. We tackle this issue by formulating guidance as explicit conditioning variables, thereby retaining flexibility at test time. The diverse conditions are processed through in-context conditioning, which reduces model size and benefits performance. Overall, our $\textbf{improved MeanFlow}$ ($\textbf{iMF}$) method, trained entirely from scratch, achieves $\textbf{1.72}$ FID with a single function evaluation (1-NFE) on ImageNet 256$\times$256. iMF substantially outperforms prior methods of this kind and closes the gap with multi-step methods while using no distillation. We hope our work will further advance fastforward generative modeling as a stand-alone paradigm.