#01Oct 15, 2026
cs.CV
SoftCache: Adaptive Step Size Caching for Diffusion Transformers
Shimon Malnick, Nadav Orenstein, Ohad Fried and 1 more
Diffusion and flow models generate a sample over iterative steps, each a full pass through a large network, and that pass dominates generation cost. Training-free caching accelerates them by reusing activations from recent evaluations instead of recomputing them. Dynamic caching methods decide when to refresh by accumulating a cheap probe of the network input into a staleness signal and spending a fresh evaluation once it crosses a threshold. They perform hard caching: the signal is a binary switch between refresh and reuse, and every step, fresh or cached, advances by the prescribed step size. We observe that the signal carries much more than this switch. How far it sits below the threshold, its headroom, predicts the error induced by reuse. We propose SoftCache, which performs soft caching: instead of a binary switch, the headroom sets how far each cached step goes. Where the headroom is large, the sampler jumps past several scheduled nodes, and as a refresh nears, its steps shrink back toward the original step. These adaptive jumps may land between the scheduled nodes, taking the sampler off its fixed grid. SoftCache requires no training and adds no per-backbone settings: on FLUX for images and on HunyuanVideo and Wan2.1 for video, at speedups from $3.5\times$ to $6.9\times$, it is ahead of every baseline on all four fidelity metrics.
#02Oct 15, 2026
cs.CV
Beyond Pairwise Repulsion: Collective Diversity via Determinant Maximization in Diffusion Sampling
Kwanyoung Lee, SeungJu Cha, Yebin Ahn and 2 more
Strong guidance in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models concentrates sampling toward high-density modes of the conditional distribution, collapsing independently sampled noise vectors onto nearly identical visual prototypes. This limits utility for tasks that demand distributional breadth, most critically synthetic data augmentation. Diversity, however, is a collective property of the whole batch: a set can preserve every pairwise distance yet still collapse onto a low-dimensional subspace. Existing sum-of-pairwise noise-optimization and repulsion objectives respond only weakly to this higher-order failure. We propose DetNO (Determinant Noise Optimization), which formulates diverse generation as RKHS volume maximization on the initial noise, maximizing the log-determinant of an RBF Gram matrix over one-step Tweedie predictions. This set-level functional equals the squared batch volume; its repulsion is strongest when the batch is most collapsed and self-attenuates as diversity is achieved. An anchor-based fidelity term keeps the optimized noises near plausible regions, and Lagrangian relaxation gives a two-term objective with a single hyperparameter $λ$ governing the diversity-quality trade-off, without training or sampler modification. Across three backbones (SD1.5, SDXL, SD3), DetNO achieves leading intra-batch diversity in VendiScore and Mean Self-Similarity, and a downstream few-shot classification experiment confirms that broader mode coverage brings statistically significant accuracy gains for synthetic data augmentation in the low-shot regime. Fixing the pipeline and varying only the batch objective, both RBF-based aggregators outperform InfoNCE, and the log-determinant attains the best downstream accuracy on both benchmarks. Its diversity advantage over InfoNCE widens as the batch grows. Code is available at https://github.com/mobled37/DetNO.
#03Oct 15, 2026
cs.CV
MMSearch-OPD: Easy Made Hard, Hard Made Learnable for Long-Horizon Multimodal Search Agents
Huanyao Zhang, Jiepeng Zhou, Jiaye Lin and 9 more
Multimodal deep search is moving from short queries to long-horizon investigations that continually acquire evidence. However, training such agents remains constrained by limited challenging training questions and insufficient process feedback. We introduce MMSearch-OPD, combining controllable data refinement with joint reinforcement learning (RL) and on-policy distillation (OPD). Our Refine pipeline performs targeted expansion of reasoning chains derived from existing simple multimodal questions. Parameterized transformations control search depth and cross-modal evidence requirements while reusing existing image--question pairs. For training, answer rewards and lightweight behavior penalties guide RL, while the reward gap modulates token-level teacher guidance on imperfect student trajectories. An exponentially decaying distillation coefficient reduces teacher dependence as training proceeds. Experiments show gains from data refinement and further improvements from joint training after SFT, indicating stronger long-horizon multimodal deep search capabilities.
#04Oct 15, 2026
cs.CV
Velox: Spatial Memory Makes World Models Efficient
Qiuhong Shen, Shizun Wang, Xinchao Wang
Video world models turn actions and camera motion into long visual rollouts, making video a natural interface for interactive simulation. Such interaction requires responsive generation, yet coherent rollouts must retain visual memory of what has already been generated. Chunked video diffusion models usually keep this context in growing KV caches, so later chunks become progressively slower. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Velox, a training-free attention router for region-level context selection using frustum slab correspondences from streaming geometry. Velox represents historical blocks as camera frustum slabs with depth intervals and obtains current-block depth through recency-priority multiwarp. For well-covered regions, frustum slab overlap softly modulates each layer's model-derived block importance. Uncovered regions retain the model-derived route without geometric bias. The fixed token-block granularity matches FlashAttention-style tiled execution and reduces the attention term that grows with rollout length. Frustum slab construction runs asynchronously with denoising on the same H200. At chunk 48, Velox accelerates attention by $4.36\times$ and denoising by $2.43\times$. On the full 158-case WBench navigation split, it remains within 0.15 API-free average points of dense LingBot-Fast-Cam. Please see our project page at https://velox-world.com/velox/ for more details.
#05Oct 15, 2026
cs.CV
SCOPE: Semantic Bounded Credit Optimization for Prompt Engineering in Text-to-image Generation
Yufei Jiao, Jinfa Huang, Zeyue Xue and 5 more
Reinforcement learning (RL) enables language models to improve text-to-image (T2I) generation by rewriting prompts for a frozen image generator. Existing methods typically apply a single signal derived from the image to individual subword tokens, although objects, counts, attributes, and relations form coherent semantic spans. We propose SCOPE, an objective based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) that aligns update weighting with this structure. The rewriter jointly generates an enhanced prompt and its semantic partition. SCOPE pools shifts in policy log probabilities within each span to derive a shared coefficient for its token losses while retaining a single advantage for each completion. It requires neither separate span rewards nor additional image renders. Across Qwen-Image, SD3, and FLUX.1-dev, SCOPE achieves average relative gains over vanilla GRPO of 9.48% on GeneVal and 7.62% on T2I-CompBench. Ablation studies show that both semantic boundaries and pooling within spans contribute to these gains, supporting semantic structure as a practical inductive bias for prompt engineering with RL.