EMAG: Self-Rectifying Diffusion Sampling with Exponential Moving Average Guidance

2025-12-19

AI Summary

Existing guided sampling methods for diffusion and flow-matching models suffer from inflexible target-layer selection and limited control over the granularity and difficulty of negative samples, hindering generation quality and consistency. This paper proposes a training-free, inference-time attention modulation mechanism: it dynamically identifies critical transformer layers via exponential moving average (EMA)–based stability statistics of layer-wise features; leverages these layers to synthesize semantically faithful, fine-grained negative samples with controllable difficulty; and incorporates a self-correction module for precise degradation and restoration. To our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce a statistics-driven, dynamic layer-selection paradigm coupled with fine-grained negative-sample generation. The method is plug-and-play on diffusion Transformers and fully compatible with mainstream guidance techniques—including Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), Adaptive Perturbation Guidance (APG), and Consistency-Aware Diffusion Sampling (CADS). Experiments demonstrate a +0.46 improvement in Human Preference Score (HPS) at zero training cost, significantly enhancing both generation fidelity and human preference.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Diffusion Models for Vision
• Natural Language Processing: Generation
• Machine Learning: Deep Generative Models & Autoencoders

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

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.

Problem

• Improves negative sample control in diffusion models
• Enhances generation quality via adaptive layer selection
• Boosts human preference scores over existing guidance methods

Innovation

• Training-free attention modification at inference
• Adaptive layer selection based on statistics
• Generates fine-grained semantically faithful negatives