ATLAS: Attention-Guided Test-Time Latent Selection for Compositional Visual Autoregressive Generation

arXiv:2610.25390v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual autoregressive models produce convincing images but can misassign attributes and spatial relations. Searching multiple generation paths can improve composition, yet completing every candidate is costly. We introduce ATLAS, a training-free framework that uses the frozen generator's internal attention to guide search before final images are available. Within-prompt diagnostics identify attention-derived scores that predict final compositional preferences on Infinity, with category-dependent transfer to Switti. ATLAS uses these on-the-fly signals to progressively concentrate computation on promising trajectories. It maintains multiple coarse alternatives, prunes candidates without decoding at intermediate scales, and reserves image-space evaluation for a final choice among partial trajectories. ATLAS scales effectively on both backbones, achieving higher mean scores on the evaluated T2I-CompBench and GenEval categories as more computation is devoted to search. At the largest tested budget, the targeted T2I-CompBench mean improves by over 10% relative to each backbone. Separate profiles show over 50% less generation time than completing and evaluating all candidates at equal initial counts, alongside lower peak allocated GPU memory. Relative time savings are larger at the higher tested candidate count. Together, these results support scalable compositional search: additional sampling expands exploration, while attention-guided selection limits continuation cost without parameter updates or gradient-based optimization.