Breaking the Lock-in: Diversifying Text-to-Image Generation via Representation Modulation

Recent text-to-image models built on large-scale Transformer backbones and flow-based objectives deliver strong text–image alignment and high visual quality, yet often produce overly similar samples under a fixed prompt. Existing diversity-enhancement methods alleviate this, but typically require expensive sampling or auxiliary optimization, incurring non-trivial overhead. To investigate the root cause of this homogeneity, we examine intermediate Transformer features and observe that the zero-frequency spatial average (DC) component rapidly converges across seeds early in generation, causing early trajectory lock-in that limits downstream variation. Building on this, we propose DC Attenuation for diVersity Enhancement (DAVE), a training-free representation-level intervention that selectively attenuates this component in the early regime. DAVE preserves the sampling pipeline with negligible overhead, improving prompt-consistent diversity while maintaining competitive image quality.