Flow-based image generators achieve strong semantic synthesis but still produce localized structural distortions, such as malformed hands and limbs. Existing post-training methods typically optimize global scalar rewards, which provide weak spatial credit assignment and may alter well-formed regions while correcting local defects. We present Diagnose-to-Generate (D2G), a grounded alignment framework that separates visual diagnosis from generative optimization. We construct Achilles-600K, a region-annotated dataset for structural anomalies, and train ARGUS through supervised cold-start and Region-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization to predict anomaly categories and bounding boxes. These diagnoses are converted into confidence-weighted spatial rewards for our Patch-level Flow-GRPO. We further identify that global stochastic exploration can shift semantic regions across group rollouts, making patch-wise relative advantages spatially inconsistent. Our Trajectory-Preserving Stochastic Sampling (TPSS) anchors early denoising with deterministic ODE trajectories and introduces stochasticity only at later steps, thereby limiting intra-group spatial drift while retaining local exploration. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and SD3.5 show improved structural fidelity with preserved FID and CLIP scores. Consistent gains under HumanRefiner, zero-shot GPT-4.1, and blinded human evaluation further demonstrate that the improvements extend beyond the training reward model.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Illustration of global and grounded structural alignment. (a) An image-level reward does not identify the region responsible for a structural defect. (b) D2G uses ARGUS diagnoses to construct spatial rewards, concentrating structural feedback around anomalous regions while retaining a global quality objective.
Figure 2. Achilles-600k construction and benchmark statistics. Diverse generators provide images for human-verified structural annotation, from which 10K grounded Reverse-CoT instances are selected for diagnostic cold-start training. The Achilles-Benchmark is independently curated and covers diverse anomaly categories, object scales, and numbers of localized defects.
Figure 3. Overview of Diagnose-to-Generate (D2G). Stage I trains ARGUS via grounded SFT and Region-Aware GRPO to localize structural anomalies. Stage II uses ARGUS diagnoses to spatially supervise Patch-level Flow-GRPO. TPSS preserves rollout correspondence, enabling localized advantages to update diagnosed regions while limiting changes elsewhere.
Figure 4. Qualitative comparison of generative alignment. (a) Global Flow-GRPO alters surrounding appearance, whereas D2G preserves it during local correction. (b) Update magnitudes are globally distributed for Flow-GRPO but concentrated around ARGUS-diagnosed regions for D2G.
Category
Model
L2 Labels Macro
Artifact Detection
Spatial
Human Align.
Prec.
Rec.
F1
Prec.
Rec.
F1
mIoU ( ↑ )
Acc. (%) ( ↑ )
Proprietary APIs
GPT-4.1 † ( OpenAI, 2025a )
0.4452
0.2105
0.2855
0.6315
0.4055
0.4950
0.2361
68.5
Gemini 3.1 Pro † ( Google, 2025 )
0.4294
0.3572
0.3905
0.5577
0.8214
0.6631
0.2814
72.4
Zero-Shot Foundation
Qwen2.5-VL-7B ( Bai et al., 2025b )
0.3395
0.0995
0.1538
0.5674
0.3597
0.4403
–
55.2
InternVL3.5-8B ( Wang et al., 2025b )
0.3802
0.1205
0.1830
0.5810
0.3822
0.4611
–
58.1
Qwen3-VL-8B ( Bai et al., 2025a )
0.4105
0.1620
0.2325
0.6015
0.4105
0.4880
–
61.3
Table 1. Diagnostic performance on Achilles-Benchmark. L2 Macro averages precision, recall, and F1 over four anomaly categories; Binary evaluates anomaly detection, and mIoU evaluates localization. † denotes structured CoT prompting for box outputs. Human Align. follows ( Wang et al., 2026 ) .
Category
Model
Abnormal Interaction
Human Anatomy
Animal Anatomy
Object Morphology
Prec.
Rec.
F1
Prec.
Rec.
F1
Prec.
Rec.
F1
Prec.
Rec.
F1
Proprietary APIs
GPT-4.1 ( OpenAI, 2025a )
0.3112
0.2054
0.2478
0.7305
0.3415
0.4655
0.5840
0.2512
0.3512
0.2645
0.1130
0.1583
Gemini 3.1 Pro ( Google, 2025 )
0.3204
0.3015
0.3106
0.7645
0.5012
0.6054
0.5620
0.3840
0.4562
0.2215
0.4420
0.2885
Zero-Shot Found.
Qwen2.5-VL-7B ( Bai et al., 2025b )
0.2008
0.1180
0.1486
0.6182
0.1358
0.2227
0.4361
0.1005
0.1634
0.1028
0.0436
0.0612
InternVL3.5-8B ( Wang et al., 2025b )
0.2315
0.1350
0.1705
0.6410
0.1620
0.2586
0.4720
0.1245
0.1965
0.1345
0.0620
0.0848
Qwen3-VL-8B ( Bai et al., 2025a )
0.2550
0.1640
0.1988
0.6855
0.2105
0.3222
0.5105
0.1660
0.2505
0.1802
0.0915
0.1215
Table 2. Diagnostic performance across fine-grained distortion categories. We report precision, recall, and F1 for abnormal interaction, human anatomy, animal anatomy, and object morphology. ARGUS consistently improves category-level F1 across three underlying VLM backbones.
Model / Alignment Strategy
Structural Fidelity on Achilles-Benchmark ( ↑ )
Global Preservation and Human Alignment
Interact.
Human
Animal
Object
Overall
FID-30K ( ↓ )
CLIP ( ↑ )
Human Win ( ↑ )
Panel A: Contemporary Foundation Models (Zero-Shot)
GPT-image-1 ( Chen et al., 2025 )
81.54
45.00
49.00
91.41
63.08
–
–
52.4%
HunyuanVideo ( Kong et al., 2024 )
86.15
43.20
48.50
88.50
62.15
–
–
51.0%
Bagel ( Deng et al., )
85.96
41.00
48.00
87.92
60.53
–
–
53.1%
Seedance 1.0 Pro ( Gao et al., 2025 )
78.37
41.00
43.00
90.56
59.54
–
–
48.5%
Table 3. End-to-end structural alignment and independent evaluation. Panels A–B report Achilles-Benchmark structural fidelity and global preservation. Panel C evaluates FLUX.1-dev outputs using HumanRefiner, zero-shot GPT-4.1, and double-blind human preference, and includes local alignment baselines. Panel D evaluates cross-architecture transfer on SD3.5-M. Best and second-best results are marked within each panel.
Ablation Variant
Diag. F1
mIoU
Fidelity
FID-30K
Stage I: Diagnostic Specialist
Full ARGUS
0.8321
0.7540
–
–
w/o Reverse-CoT
0.7510
0.6150
–
–
w/o Bipartite GIoU Match
0.6845
0.5210
–
–
w/o Consistency Gate ( rc )
0.7890
0.4250
–
–
w/o Multi-Bucket Sampling
0.7415
0.7105
–
–
Table 4. Component ablations. Stage I reports diagnostic F1 and localization mIoU; Stage II reports Achilles structural fidelity and FID-30K. Reverse-CoT evaluates the grounded data engine, while Confidence-Decay evaluates robustness to uncertain ARGUS diagnoses.
Appendix figures & tables6 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure S1 . Examples of diagnostic feedback. Image-level scores summarize overall quality, while textual assessments can describe defects without locating them. ARGUS additionally predicts anomaly boxes, making its feedback usable for spatial reward assignment. The examples illustrate output formats rather than a general impossibility of grounding with other MLLMs.
Setting
Value
Stage I: SFT
Training examples
10K
Global batch size
128
Training epochs
2
Peak learning rate
2×10−5
Learning-rate schedule
Cosine
Appendix
Table S1 . Training configuration. Gaussian smoothing is specified in latent-grid units. The Stage-I localization threshold and Stage-II confidence threshold serve different purposes.
Model
Prec.
Rec.
mIoU
GPT-4.1 ( OpenAI, 2025a )
0.6315
0.4055
0.2361
Gemini 3.1 Pro ( Google, 2025 )
0.5577
0.8214
0.2814
ARGUS
0.8655
0.8012
0.7540
Appendix
Table S2 . Forced-box diagnostic evaluation. Structured CoT prompting requires proprietary models to emit bounding boxes. Precision and recall refer to binary anomaly detection.
Alignment
Human Fidelity
Overall Fidelity
FID-30K
Base SD3.5-M
39.33
54.82
20.15
Global Flow-GRPO
42.10
58.20
26.40
Patch-level Flow-GRPO
76.45
81.50
20.10
Appendix
Table S3 . Stage-II alignment on SD3.5-Medium. Fidelity is evaluated on Achilles-Benchmark. Higher fidelity and lower FID are preferable.
Figure S2 . Sensitivity to the TPSS branching timestep. The original sweep reports structural fidelity and FID at different values of tcritical . Intermediate thresholds provide a better trade-off than nearly deterministic sampling or early stochastic exploration.
Variant
Diag. F1
mIoU
Fidelity
FID
Full D2G
0.8321
0.7540
85.60
18.35
w/o Reverse-CoT
0.751
0.615
–
–
w/o Confidence-Decay
–
–
84.15
21.40
Appendix
Table S4 . Additional pipeline ablations. Reverse-CoT is evaluated through Stage-I diagnostics; Confidence-Decay is evaluated through Stage-II generation. Precision is retained as reported in the corresponding experiments.
Current flow matching models learn to transport the source i.i.d. Gaussian noise into the target distribution of natural images, yet this source distribution carries no notion of spatial structure. Images however are fundamentally local since nearby pixels are strongly correlated. By sampling the noise independently, we hypothesize that models are implicitly encouraged to exploit less noisy neighbors as context during training, partially bypassing the need to properly learn the true local structure of images. The source distribution, in other words, works against the inductive bias of the image domain. To ameliorate this design discrepancy, we propose StructFlow which encodes spatial locality directly into the source by having the pixels within a small region share a common noise component. This structured source produces transport paths that are geometrically aligned with image regions - enabling properties that generic flow matching struggles to provide: fine-grained local editing that naturally respects boundaries, robust structure preservation, and smooth semantic interpolation between images. We show that these benefits also extend to large pre-trained models, demonstrating that StructFlow can even be incorporated through a lightweight post-training phase. Comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets, in unconditional, class and text-conditioned regimes, using different diffusion transformer architectures confirm that StructFlow not only offers competitive image generation quality, but also significantly improves localized controllable re-synthesis.
We present FlowFixer, a refinement framework for subject-driven generation (SDG) that restores fine details lost during generation caused by changes in scale and perspective of a subject. FlowFixer proposes direct image-to-image translation from visual references, avoiding ambiguities in language prompts. To enable image-to-image training, we introduce a one-step denoising scheme to generate self-supervised training data, which automatically removes high-frequency details while preserving global structure, effectively simulating real-world SDG errors. We further propose a keypoint matching-based metric to properly assess fidelity in details beyond semantic similarities usually measured by CLIP or DINO. Experimental results demonstrate that FlowFixer outperforms state-of-the-art SDG methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, setting a new benchmark for high-fidelity subject-driven generation.
We aim to improve frozen flow-matching image generators by adding inference computation inside the denoiser, without changing model weights or the outer sampler. Existing generators usually spend extra test-time computation by increasing the number of sampling steps, which repeatedly evaluates the entire denoiser and couples quality gains to sampler cost. A key challenge is how to use extra computation inside a frozen transformer denoiser: the method must decide which tokens, layers, and sampling times receive repeated updates while preserving the original generation pipeline. We introduce a training-free looping framework that repeatedly applies selected transformer layers inside each denoising call. Dense and Sparse Token Loop vary the token scope; Sampling-Progress Gating and the loop layer range specify when and where looping is active; loop count and strength control the repeated updates; and Loop Guidance combines ordinary and looped vector-field predictions. Across two Scale-RAE model scales, loop variants improve primary and auxiliary quality metrics with competitive quality--efficiency trade-offs. Loop Guidance further improves both primary metrics across all three tested models; on Scale-RAE DiT2.4B, it raises GenEval from 0.4471 to 0.5691 and DPG-Bench from 0.7656 to 0.8053. Code will be released.
Yuanyi Yan, Xinzhe Rao, Canyu Shen +5
Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Tongji University · King Abdullah University of Science and Technology +2