EMAG: Self-Rectifying Diffusion Sampling with Exponential Moving Average Guidance
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in diffusion model sampling for generative AI, offering an incremental but measurable enhancement in sample quality.
The paper tackled the problem of unreliable control over negative sample granularity and fixed target-layer selection in diffusion model guidance, resulting in a +0.46 improvement in human preference score over classifier-free guidance.
In diffusion and flow-matching generative models, guidance techniques are widely used to improve sample quality and consistency. Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is the de facto choice in modern systems and achieves this by contrasting conditional and unconditional samples. Recent work explores contrasting negative samples at inference using a weaker model, via strong/weak model pairs, attention-based masking, stochastic block dropping, or perturbations to the self-attention energy landscape. While these strategies refine the generation quality, they still lack reliable control over the granularity or difficulty of the negative samples, and target-layer selection is often fixed. We propose Exponential Moving Average Guidance (EMAG), a training-free mechanism that modifies attention at inference time in diffusion transformers, with a statistics-based, adaptive layer-selection rule. Unlike prior methods, EMAG produces harder, semantically faithful negatives (fine-grained degradations), surfacing difficult failure modes, enabling the denoiser to refine subtle artifacts, boosting the quality and human preference score (HPS) by +0.46 over CFG. We further demonstrate that EMAG naturally composes with advanced guidance techniques, such as APG and CADS, further improving HPS.