Title: What Drives Compositional Generalization in Visual Generative Models?
Primary area: generative models
Keywords: compositional generalization, diffusion models, training objective, masked generative, models

Abstract: Compositional generalization, the ability to generate novel combinations of known concepts, is a key ingredient for visual generative models. Yet, not all mechanisms that enable or inhibit it are fully understood. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of how various design choices influence compositional generalization in image and video generation in a positive or negative way. Through controlled experiments, we identify two key factors: (i) whether the training objective operates on a discrete or continuous distribution, and (ii) to what extent conditioning provides information about the constituent concepts. Building on these insights, we show that relaxing the MaskGIT discrete loss with an auxiliary continuous JEPA-based objective can improve compositional performance in discrete models like MaskGIT.

TL;DR: We isolate the factors responsible for reliable compositional generalization in visual generative models