Paper
Toward Early Quality Assessment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors
Huanlei Guo, Hongxin Wei, Bingyi Jing
Abstract
Recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion and flow-matching models can produce highly realistic images from natural language prompts. In practical scenarios, T2I systems are often run in a ``generate--then--select'' mode: many seeds are sampled and only a few images are kept for use. However, this pipeline is highly resource-intensive since each candidate requires tens to hundreds of denoising steps, and evaluation metrics such as CLIPScore and ImageReward are post-hoc. In this work, we address this inefficiency by introducing Probe-Select, a plug-in module that enables efficient evaluation of image quality within the generation process. We observe that certain intermediate denoiser activations, even at early timesteps, encode a stable coarse structure, object layout and spatial arrangement--that strongly correlates with final image fidelity. Probe-Select exploits this property by predicting final quality scores directly from early activations, allowing unpromising seeds to be terminated early. Across diffusion and flow-matching backbones, our experiments show that early evaluation at only 20\% of the trajectory accurately ranks candidate seeds and enables selective continuation. This strategy reduces sampling cost by over 60\% while improving the quality of the retained images, demonstrating that early structural signals can effectively guide selective generation without altering the underlying generative model. Code is available at https://github.com/Guhuary/ProbeSelect.
Metadata
Related papers
Gen-Searcher: Reinforcing Agentic Search for Image Generation
Kaituo Feng, Manyuan Zhang, Shuang Chen, Yunlong Lin, Kaixuan Fan, Yilei Jian... • 2026-03-30
On-the-fly Repulsion in the Contextual Space for Rich Diversity in Diffusion Transformers
Omer Dahary, Benaya Koren, Daniel Garibi, Daniel Cohen-Or • 2026-03-30
Graphilosophy: Graph-Based Digital Humanities Computing with The Four Books
Minh-Thu Do, Quynh-Chau Le-Tran, Duc-Duy Nguyen-Mai, Thien-Trang Nguyen, Khan... • 2026-03-30
ParaSpeechCLAP: A Dual-Encoder Speech-Text Model for Rich Stylistic Language-Audio Pretraining
Anuj Diwan, Eunsol Choi, David Harwath • 2026-03-30
RAD-AI: Rethinking Architecture Documentation for AI-Augmented Ecosystems
Oliver Aleksander Larsen, Mahyar T. Moghaddam • 2026-03-30
Raw Data (Debug)
{
"raw_xml": "<entry>\n <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02829v1</id>\n <title>Toward Early Quality Assessment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models</title>\n <updated>2026-03-03T10:25:46Z</updated>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02829v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.02829v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n <summary>Recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion and flow-matching models can produce highly realistic images from natural language prompts. In practical scenarios, T2I systems are often run in a ``generate--then--select'' mode: many seeds are sampled and only a few images are kept for use. However, this pipeline is highly resource-intensive since each candidate requires tens to hundreds of denoising steps, and evaluation metrics such as CLIPScore and ImageReward are post-hoc. In this work, we address this inefficiency by introducing Probe-Select, a plug-in module that enables efficient evaluation of image quality within the generation process. We observe that certain intermediate denoiser activations, even at early timesteps, encode a stable coarse structure, object layout and spatial arrangement--that strongly correlates with final image fidelity. Probe-Select exploits this property by predicting final quality scores directly from early activations, allowing unpromising seeds to be terminated early. Across diffusion and flow-matching backbones, our experiments show that early evaluation at only 20\\% of the trajectory accurately ranks candidate seeds and enables selective continuation. This strategy reduces sampling cost by over 60\\% while improving the quality of the retained images, demonstrating that early structural signals can effectively guide selective generation without altering the underlying generative model. Code is available at https://github.com/Guhuary/ProbeSelect.</summary>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.CV'/>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.LG'/>\n <published>2026-03-03T10:25:46Z</published>\n <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.CV'/>\n <author>\n <name>Huanlei Guo</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Hongxin Wei</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Bingyi Jing</name>\n </author>\n </entry>"
}