# Information-Theoretic Classifier-Free Guidance with Adaptive Schedule Optimization Source: [Information-Theoretic Classifier-Free Guidance with Adaptive Schedule Optimization]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-06-25T05:00:21.027Z Authors: Haobo Chen, Xiangxiang Xu, Yuheng Bu Published: 2026-06-23T00:04:04.000Z ## Abstract Diffusion models have achieved strong performance in image, text-to-image, and video generation, where conditional generation is often controlled by classifier-free guidance (CFG). CFG improves condition consistency by increasing a guidance weight, but stronger guidance typically reduces diversity and distributional coverage. It remains unclear how this consistency-coverage trade-off should be controlled across the reverse trajectory, since the distribution induced by CFG is not simply the fixed-time tilted distribution given by the guided score field. To address this issue, we propose an information-theoretic framework for CFG schedule optimization. Our approach uses a clean endpoint reference to specify the desired consistency-coverage trade-off, while optimizing the actual distribution induced by the guided sampler toward this reference. We derive trajectory-level formulas to estimate the objective from samples and score evaluations, avoiding explicit density estimation. On ImageNet-512 with EDM-XXL and COCO with SD-XL, the learned schedules achieve competitive or improved trade-offs over constant guidance and allocate guidance selectively across noise levels. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()