A Universal Avoidance Method for Diverse Multi-branch Generation
Authors: Kyeongman Park, Minha Jhang, Kyomin Jung
Organizations: Seoul National University
Abstract
Modern generative models still lack human-level creativity, particularly in multi-branch diversity. Prior approaches to address this problem often incur heavy computation or strong dependency on model architecture. Therefore, we introduce UAG(Universal Avoidance Generation), a model-agnostic and computationally efficient generation strategy that penalizes similarity among previously generated outputs. Thus, UAG can enhance multi-branch diversity across both diffusion and transformer models, with minimal additional computation. In experiments, our method achieves up to 1.9 times higher diversity, runs 4.4 times faster, and requires only 1/64 of the FLOPs compared to state-of-the-art methods. The full code is https://anonymous.4open.science/r/2026_ACL_Universal/.
Open-ended generation tasks often require a set of meaningfully different outputs, yet large language models often produce similar generations. Existing test-time diversity methods operate at different stages of generation with varying effectiveness, but it remains unclear what design choices lead to meaningful diversity in the output. We introduce a framework that characterizes test-time diverse generation methods by the diversity source introduced during generation and provide a transmission score for measuring how effectively variation in the source reaches the final output. Guided by this framework, we propose fully automated specification-level generation methods that first generate diverse intermediate specifications and then condition on them to produce final responses. Across five open-ended tasks and four backbone models, specification-level injection improves output diversity over test-time baselines while maintaining comparable quality. Our analysis shows that successful diversity injection depends on both the diversity of the sources and their transmission to the output, highlighting source design and source-to-output realization as two key levers for building more diverse generation systems.
We introduce DiverseVAR, a framework that enhances the diversity of text-conditioned visual autoregressive models (VAR) at test time without requiring retraining, fine-tuning, or substantial computational overhead. While VAR models have recently emerged as strong competitors to diffusion and flow models for image generation, they suffer from a critical limitation in diversity, often producing nearly identical images even for simple prompts. This issue has largely gone unnoticed amid the predominant focus on image quality. We address this limitation at test time in two stages. First, inspired by diversity enhancement techniques in diffusion models, we propose injecting noise into the text embedding. This introduces a trade-off between diversity and image quality: as diversity increases, the image quality sharply declines. To preserve quality, we propose scale-travel: a novel latent refinement technique inspired by time-travel strategies in diffusion models. Specifically, we use a multi-scale autoencoder to extract coarse-scale tokens that enable us to resume generation at intermediate stages. Extensive experiments show that combining text-embedding noise injection with our scale-travel refinement significantly enhances diversity while minimizing image-quality degradation, achieving a new Pareto frontier in the diversity-quality trade-off. Project page: https://diverse-var.github.io
Mingue Park, Prin Phunyaphibarn, Phillip Y. Lee +1
Unified Multimodal models (UMMs) built on a single architecture have shown impressive performance in both understanding and generation. We identify a fundamental challenge that lies in inductive biases induced by distinct supervision signals: generation branch prefers high-fidelity, fine-grained representations capable of reconstruction, while the understanding favours semantically discriminative embeddings that remain invariant to task-irrelevant factors. Consequently, optimizing these complementary but non-equivalent objectives within a monolithic backbone leads to mutual impairment instead of enhancement. In this paper, we first analyze the root cause of this interference in unified backbones and reveal a complementary structure in their internal representations. Motivated by the observation, we propose DIVA, a self-improved post-training framework that transforms the representation divergence into interior synergy. By explicitly factorizing the visual representation into shared and unique components based on two complementary information flow, DIVA enables both the understanding and generation branches to achieve beneficial transferring while preserving the integrity of unique information from cross-flow interference via mutual information estimation. Despite its generality, our method consistently achieves improvements across visual understanding (+7.82%) and generation (+8.46%). The official code is available at: https://github.com/Jayyy-H/DIVA.