Toward Early Quality Assessment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| author | Guo, Huanlei Wei, Hongxin Jing, Bingyi |
| author_facet | Guo, Huanlei Wei, Hongxin Jing, Bingyi |
| contents | 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. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02829 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Toward Early Quality Assessment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models Guo, Huanlei Wei, Hongxin Jing, Bingyi Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning 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. |
| title | Toward Early Quality Assessment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02829 |