{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/visual-generation-without-guidance","title":"Visual Generation Without Guidance","arxiv_id":"2501.15420","date":"2025-01-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Huayu Chen","Kai Jiang","Kaiwen Zheng","Jianfei Chen","Hang Su","Jun Zhu"],"abstract":"Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) has been a default technique in various visual generative models, yet it requires inference from both conditional and unconditional models during sampling. We propose to build visual models that are free from guided sampling. The resulting algorithm, Guidance-Free Training (GFT), matches the performance of CFG while reducing sampling to a single model, halving the computational cost. Unlike previous distillation-based approaches that rely on pretrained CFG networks, GFT enables training directly from scratch. GFT is simple to implement. It retains the same maximum likelihood objective as CFG and differs mainly in the parameterization of conditional models. Implementing GFT requires only minimal modifications to existing codebases, as most design choices and hyperparameters are directly inherited from CFG. Our extensive experiments across five distinct visual models demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of GFT. Across domains of diffusion, autoregressive, and masked-prediction modeling, GFT consistently achieves comparable or even lower FID scores, with similar diversity-fidelity trade-offs compared with CFG baselines, all while being guidance-free. Code will be available at https://github.com/thu-ml/GFT.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15420v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15420v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"visual-generation-without-guidance","repo_url":"https://github.com/thu-ml/gft","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2501.15420","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2501.15420"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/thu-ml/GFT","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/thu-ml/gft","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"ba65976c1d96a7cb","entry":"creat_optimizer","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"ba65976c1d96a7cb"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}