Scaling Group Inference for Diverse and High-Quality Generation

Generative models typically sample outputs independently, and recent inference-time guidance and scaling algorithms focus on improving the quality of individual samples. However, in real-world applications, users are often presented with a set of multiple images (e.g., 4-8) for each prompt, where independent sampling tends to lead to redundant results, limiting user choices and hindering idea exploration. In this work, we introduce a scalable group inference method that improves both the diversity and quality of a group of samples. We formulate group inference as a quadratic integer assignment problem: candidate outputs are modeled as graph nodes, and a subset is selected to optimize sample quality (unary term) while maximizing group diversity (binary term). To substantially improve runtime efficiency, we use intermediate predictions of the final sample at each step to progressively prune the candidate set, allowing our method to scale up efficiently to large input candidate sets. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves group diversity and quality compared to independent sampling baselines and recent inference algorithms. Our framework generalizes across a wide range of tasks, including text-to-image, image-to-image, and image prompting, enabling generative models to treat multiple outputs as cohesive groups rather than independent samples.