Alleviating Sparse Rewards by Modeling Step-Wise and Long-Term Sampling Effects in Flow-Based GRPOYunze Tong, Mushui Liu, Canyu Zhao et al.
Deploying GRPO on Flow Matching models has proven effective for text-to-image generation. However, existing paradigms typically propagate an outcome-based reward to all preceding denoising steps without distinguishing the local effect of each step. Moreover, current group-wise ranking mainly compares trajectories at matched timesteps and ignores within-trajectory dependencies, where certain early denoising actions can affect later states via delayed, implicit interactions. We propose TurningPoint-GRPO (TP-GRPO), a GRPO framework that alleviates step-wise reward sparsity and explicitly models long-term effects within the denoising trajectory. TP-GRPO makes two key innovations: (i) it replaces outcome-based rewards with step-level incremental rewards, providing a dense, step-aware learning signal that better isolates each denoising action's "pure" effect, and (ii) it identifies turning points-steps that flip the local reward trend and make subsequent reward evolution consistent with the overall trajectory trend-and assigns these actions an aggregated long-term reward to capture their delayed impact. Turning points are detected solely via sign changes in incremental rewards, making TP-GRPO efficient and hyperparameter-free. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that TP-GRPO exploits reward signals more effectively and consistently improves generation. Demo code is available at https://github.com/YunzeTong/TurningPoint-GRPO.
6.9CVJan 8
Re-Align: Structured Reasoning-guided Alignment for In-Context Image Generation and EditingRunze He, Yiji Cheng, Tiankai Hang et al.
In-context image generation and editing (ICGE) enables users to specify visual concepts through interleaved image-text prompts, demanding precise understanding and faithful execution of user intent. Although recent unified multimodal models exhibit promising understanding capabilities, these strengths often fail to transfer effectively to image generation. We introduce Re-Align, a unified framework that bridges the gap between understanding and generation through structured reasoning-guided alignment. At its core lies the In-Context Chain-of-Thought (IC-CoT), a structured reasoning paradigm that decouples semantic guidance and reference association, providing clear textual target and mitigating confusion among reference images. Furthermore, Re-Align introduces an effective RL training scheme that leverages a surrogate reward to measure the alignment between structured reasoning text and the generated image, thereby improving the model's overall performance on ICGE tasks. Extensive experiments verify that Re-Align outperforms competitive methods of comparable model scale and resources on both in-context image generation and editing tasks.
23.5CVMar 26
TAG-MoE: Task-Aware Gating for Unified Generative Mixture-of-ExpertsYu Xu, Hongbin Yan, Juan Cao et al.
Unified image generation and editing models suffer from severe task interference in dense diffusion transformers architectures, where a shared parameter space must compromise between conflicting objectives (e.g., local editing v.s. subject-driven generation). While the sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm is a promising solution, its gating networks remain task-agnostic, operating based on local features, unaware of global task intent. This task-agnostic nature prevents meaningful specialization and fails to resolve the underlying task interference. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to inject semantic intent into MoE routing. We introduce a Hierarchical Task Semantic Annotation scheme to create structured task descriptors (e.g., scope, type, preservation). We then design Predictive Alignment Regularization to align internal routing decisions with the task's high-level semantics. This regularization evolves the gating network from a task-agnostic executor to a dispatch center. Our model effectively mitigates task interference, outperforming dense baselines in fidelity and quality, and our analysis shows that experts naturally develop clear and semantically correlated specializations.
14.4CVDec 21, 2025
Memorize-and-Generate: Towards Long-Term Consistency in Real-Time Video GenerationTianrui Zhu, Shiyi Zhang, Zhirui Sun et al.
Frame-level autoregressive (frame-AR) models have achieved significant progress, enabling real-time video generation comparable to bidirectional diffusion models and serving as a foundation for interactive world models and game engines. However, current approaches in long video generation typically rely on window attention, which naively discards historical context outside the window, leading to catastrophic forgetting and scene inconsistency; conversely, retaining full history incurs prohibitive memory costs. To address this trade-off, we propose \textbf{Memorize-and-Generate (MAG)}, a framework that decouples memory compression and frame generation into distinct tasks. Specifically, we train a memory model to compress historical information into a compact KV cache, and a separate generator model to synthesize subsequent frames utilizing this compressed representation. Furthermore, we introduce \textbf{MAG-Bench} to strictly evaluate historical memory retention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAG achieves superior historical scene consistency while maintaining competitive performance on standard video generation benchmarks.