Unpaired image-to-image translation has seen significant progress since the introduction of CycleGAN. However, methods based on diffusion models or Schrödinger bridges have yet to be widely adopted in real-world applications due to their iterative sampling nature. To address this challenge, we propose Implicit Bridge Consistency Distillation (IBCD), which enables single-step bidirectional unpaired translation without using adversarial loss. IBCD reformulates consistency distillation by using a diffusion implicit bridge model that connects PF-ODE trajectories between distributions, parametrized on a signed time axis whose sign selects the target domain, so that one network translates in both directions in a single step. Additionally, we introduce two key improvements: 1) distribution matching for consistency distillation and 2) adaptive weighting method based on distillation difficulty. Experimental results demonstrate that IBCD achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets in a single generation step, and that it extends to brain MRI contrast translation.
Reward guidance steers a pretrained diffusion or flow model toward images or actions that a reward model prefers, at sampling time and without retraining the model for each reward. It follows the gradient of a value function, the expected reward given the noisy state. The two common estimates of this gradient, gradients through a one-step denoised estimate and learned value models, are least accurate at high noise, where the coarse structure of the sample is decided. Interestingly, we find that both errors are posterior covariances, which grow with the uncertainty about the clean sample, and hence at higher noise. To reduce them, we evaluate the value at a less noisy state, one sampler step ahead, where this uncertainty is smaller, and pull its gradient back to the current state. This lookahead places both estimators at the two ends of one family and reveals that an intermediate lookahead requires one additional term, a correction through the generator. We therefore propose Value Gradient Lookahead and Pullback (VaLoP), which computes this correction with one vector-Jacobian product, and VaLoP-Fast, which amortizes it with a small head that, for text-to-image models, is trained with a single reward and reused for the others. Across various models, rewards, and benchmark datasets, both robustly outperform existing value-gradient guidance on the target reward, VaLoP-Fast at about the cost of learned-value guidance. Both extend to critic-guided robot policies, where VaLoP-Fast attains the highest success rates on LIBERO and RoboCasa.
Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) improves sample quality in diffusion models, but its dual-pass inference and null-condition training limit its use in few-step regimes. Attention-space guidance is a single-pass alternative, yet why sparse-versus-dense attention guidance works remains elusive. We analyze attention extrapolation through Modern Hopfield dynamics and establish two directional properties of the sparse-dense discrepancy under shared conditioning that identify it as an acceleration direction toward the dominant stored pattern. Building on this, we propose Directional Attention Guidance (DAG), a training-free, single-pass rule that amplifies only the component of the discrepancy aligned with the retrieval direction; stability follows from a weak contraction property, and an analysis inside real cross-attention layers shows that this alignment is observed throughout sampling. DAG generalizes across UNet and MMDiT backbones and multi-step and few-step regimes, improving text alignment and human-preference scores on every backbone tested, including FLUX.1, FLUX.2, and Qwen-Image, at a small added cost per image over the base sampler.