UNCAGE: Contrastive Attention Guidance for Masked Generative Transformers in Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has been actively studied using Diffusion Models and Autoregressive Models. Recently, Masked Generative Transformers have gained attention as an alternative to Autoregressive Models to overcome the inherent limitations of causal attention and autoregressive decoding through bidirectional attention and parallel decoding, enabling efficient and high-quality image generation. However, compositional T2I generation remains challenging, as even state-of-the-art Diffusion Models often fail to accurately bind attributes and achieve proper text-image alignment. While Diffusion Models have been extensively studied for this issue, Masked Generative Transformers exhibit similar limitations but have not been explored in this context. To address this, we propose Unmasking with Contrastive Attention Guidance (UNCAGE), a novel training-free method that improves compositional fidelity by leveraging attention maps to prioritize the unmasking of tokens that clearly represent individual objects. UNCAGE consistently improves performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations across multiple benchmarks and metrics, with negligible inference overhead. Our code is available at https://github.com/furiosa-ai/uncage.

Invertible Monotone Operators for Normalizing Flows

Normalizing flows model probability distributions by learning invertible transformations that transfer a simple distribution into complex distributions. Since the architecture of ResNet-based normalizing flows is more flexible than that of coupling-based models, ResNet-based normalizing flows have been widely studied in recent years. Despite their architectural flexibility, it is well-known that the current ResNet-based models suffer from constrained Lipschitz constants. In this paper, we propose the monotone formulation to overcome the issue of the Lipschitz constants using monotone operators and provide an in-depth theoretical analysis. Furthermore, we construct an activation function called Concatenated Pila (CPila) to improve gradient flow. The resulting model, Monotone Flows, exhibits an excellent performance on multiple density estimation benchmarks (MNIST, CIFAR-10, ImageNet32, ImageNet64). Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/MonotoneFlows.