Self-Adversarial One Step Generation via Condition Shifting
The push for efficient text to image synthesis has moved the field toward one step sampling, yet existing methods still face a three way tradeoff among fidelity, inference speed, and training efficiency. Approaches that rely on external discriminators can sharpen one step performance, but they often introduce training instability, high GPU memory overhead, and slow convergence, which complicates scaling and parameter efficient tuning. In contrast, regression based distillation and consistency objectives are easier to optimize, but they typically lose fine details when constrained to a single step. We present APEX, built on a key theoretical insight: adversarial correction signals can be extracted endogenously from a flow model through condition shifting. Using a transformation creates a shifted condition branch whose velocity field serves as an independent estimator of the model's current generation distribution, yielding a gradient that is provably GAN aligned, replacing the sample dependent discriminator terms that cause gradient vanishing. This discriminator free design is architecture preserving, making APEX a plug and play framework compatible with both full parameter and LoRA based tuning. Empirically, our 0.6B model surpasses FLUX-Schnell 12B (20times more parameters) in one step quality. With LoRA tuning on Qwen-Image 20B, APEX reaches a GenEval score of 0.89 at NFE=1 in 6 hours, surpassing the original 50-step teacher (0.87) and providing a 15.33times inference speedup. Code is available https://github.com/LINs-lab/APEX.
69df06fad3c84fcbf292186d
Deyuan Liu
69df06fad3c84fcbf292186e
Peng Sun
69df06fad3c84fcbf292186f
Yansen Han
69df06fad3c84fcbf2921870
Zhenglin Cheng
claimed_verified
2026-04-16T20:21:45.412Z
65028e8389707f182386588c
/avatars/86a748a3264e6e0f4ee5eaf8f7032ecb.svg
Zhenglin Cheng
kenshinn
user
kenshinn
69df06fad3c84fcbf2921871
Chuyan Chen
69df06fad3c84fcbf2921872
Tao Lin
Self-Adversarial One Step Generation via Condition Shifting
The push for efficient text to image synthesis has moved the field toward one step sampling, yet existing methods still face a three way tradeoff among fidelity, inference speed, and training efficiency. Approaches that rely on external discriminators can sharpen one step performance, but they often introduce training instability, high GPU memory overhead, and slow convergence, which complicates scaling and parameter efficient tuning. In contrast, regression based distillation and consistency objectives are easier to optimize, but they typically lose fine details when constrained to a single step. We present APEX, built on a key theoretical insight: adversarial correction signals can be extracted endogenously from a flow model through condition shifting. Using a transformation creates a shifted condition branch whose velocity field serves as an independent estimator of the model's current generation distribution, yielding a gradient that is provably GAN aligned, replacing the sample dependent discriminator terms that cause gradient vanishing. This discriminator free design is architecture preserving, making APEX a plug and play framework compatible with both full parameter and LoRA based tuning. Empirically, our 0.6B model surpasses FLUX-Schnell 12B (20times more parameters) in one step quality. With LoRA tuning on Qwen-Image 20B, APEX reaches a GenEval score of 0.89 at NFE=1 in 6 hours, surpassing the original 50-step teacher (0.87) and providing a 15.33times inference speedup. Code is available https://github.com/LINs-lab/APEX.
APEx enables efficient one-step text-to-image synthesis by eliminating adversarial training through endogenous gradient estimation from flow models, achieving superior quality and speed compared to existing methods.
adversarial correction signals flow model condition shifting velocity field GAN aligned discriminator free architecture preserving parameter-efficient tuning LoRA one step sampling regression based distillation consistency objectives GenEval score NFE