Improving Controllable Generation: Faster Training and Better Performance via $x_0$-Supervision

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sangare, Amadou S., Maglo, Adrien, Chaouch, Mohamed, Luvison, Bertrand
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sangare, Amadou S.
Maglo, Adrien
Chaouch, Mohamed
Luvison, Bertrand
author_facet Sangare, Amadou S.
Maglo, Adrien
Chaouch, Mohamed
Luvison, Bertrand
contents Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion/flow models have recently achieved remarkable progress in visual fidelity and text alignment. However, they remain limited when users need to precisely control image layouts, something that natural language alone cannot reliably express. Controllable generation methods augment the initial T2I model with additional conditions that more easily describe the scene. Prior works straightforwardly train the augmented network with the same loss as the initial network. Although natural at first glance, this can lead to very long training times in some cases before convergence. In this work, we revisit the training objective of controllable diffusion models through a detailed analysis of their denoising dynamics. We show that direct supervision on the clean target image, dubbed $x_0$-supervision, or an equivalent re-weighting of the diffusion loss, yields faster convergence. Experiments on multiple control settings demonstrate that our formulation accelerates convergence by up to 2$\times$ according to our novel metric (mean Area Under the Convergence Curve - mAUCC), while also improving both visual quality and conditioning accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/CEA-LIST/x0-supervision
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_05761
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Controllable Generation: Faster Training and Better Performance via $x_0$-Supervision
Sangare, Amadou S.
Maglo, Adrien
Chaouch, Mohamed
Luvison, Bertrand
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion/flow models have recently achieved remarkable progress in visual fidelity and text alignment. However, they remain limited when users need to precisely control image layouts, something that natural language alone cannot reliably express. Controllable generation methods augment the initial T2I model with additional conditions that more easily describe the scene. Prior works straightforwardly train the augmented network with the same loss as the initial network. Although natural at first glance, this can lead to very long training times in some cases before convergence. In this work, we revisit the training objective of controllable diffusion models through a detailed analysis of their denoising dynamics. We show that direct supervision on the clean target image, dubbed $x_0$-supervision, or an equivalent re-weighting of the diffusion loss, yields faster convergence. Experiments on multiple control settings demonstrate that our formulation accelerates convergence by up to 2$\times$ according to our novel metric (mean Area Under the Convergence Curve - mAUCC), while also improving both visual quality and conditioning accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/CEA-LIST/x0-supervision
title Improving Controllable Generation: Faster Training and Better Performance via $x_0$-Supervision
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05761