ATLAS: Attention-Guided Test-Time Latent Selection for Compositional Visual Autoregressive Generation

Visual autoregressive (VAR) models offer fast, high-quality text-to-image generation but still fail at attribute binding and spatial relations. Existing VAR test-time methods search sampled trajectories or apply generic logit guidance but do not directly optimize compositional constraints; gradient-based diffusion methods do not transfer to stateful, discrete, multi-resolution VAR sampling. We introduce $\textbf{VISTA}$ ($\textbf{Vi}$sual Autoregressive $\textbf{S}$emantic $\textbf{T}$est-time $\textbf{A}$lignment), the first gradient-based test-time framework for compositional alignment in next-scale autoregressive image generation. Built on Infinity, VISTA optimizes intermediate representations through the frozen transformer without parameter updates or training. It stabilizes optimization across scales and exposes a common interface into which any differentiable constraint on cross-attention can be plugged. Across two benchmarks and model scales, VISTA improves every targeted category, raising the mean by nearly 20% on a 2B backbone and almost 6% on an 8B backbone, especially on spatial relations. In human evaluation, VISTA wins 83% of decisive compositionality comparisons by plurality vote, with no significant preference in perceived quality; independently, ImageReward scores its outputs 20% higher. VISTA enables the 2B model to surpass a backbone four times its size, showing much of the compositional gap is recoverable at test time.

Text-to-image models have made remarkable progress in visual fidelity and instruction following, yet complex compositional generation remains challenging. Existing agentic approaches address this limitation through iterative generation and editing, adapting their actions based on interaction history. However, they typically fix the continuation state (i.e., the image from which refinement proceeds) to the latest image. Since iterative editing is not necessarily monotonic, the agent may continue refining from the latest image even when it has already degraded. In this work, we introduce GenRevisit, an agentic framework that extends action selection to joint continuation-state and action selection. The agent can not only use interaction history to adjust editing instructions but also select an image candidate to edit, jointly deciding where to continue from and how to refine. We train GenRevisit with SFT followed by agentic reinforcement learning. To address the coarse credit assignment of final outcome reward in GRPO, which assigns the same trajectory-level advantage to all actions, we further propose Normalized Action Credit Assignment (NACA) to redistribute positive advantage according to each action's contribution to reducing the remaining objective. On GenEval2, GenRevisit achieves GM scores of 84.3 and 74.4 with Qwen-Image-2512 and Z-Image-Turbo, surpassing the strongest baselines using the same generators by 12.7 and 10.9 points respectively. GenRevisit achieves state-of-the-art performance on GenEval, GenEval++, and GenEval2 among baselines.

Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have made rapid progress on semantic alignment (generating what is described in the prompt), yet users still lack reliable control over aesthetic composition (how visual elements are put together). Prior work often treats aesthetics as a single, preference-driven notion (e.g., "high quality", "detailed", "breathtaking"), which does not map cleanly to compositional intent. We propose Aesthetic Alignment: aligning generated images to explicit, user-specified compositional constraints. We operationalize these constraints using the Principles of Art (PoA)-e.g., Balance, Rhythm, and Emphasis-commonly used in art education to describe composition. To support this task, we introduce CompArt, a dataset of 80,032 WikiArt images augmented with captions and PoA analyses produced by a multimodal LLM under structured prompting. We further propose ArtDapter, a lightweight and disentangled adapter that enables steering a pretrained T2I model along 10 PoA dimensions while retaining the base model's semantic capability. Experiments on CompArt show improved adherence to PoA controls over strong baselines under a dual evaluation protocol.