# MaskSense: Confronting the Visual Exploration Trap in Masked Image Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17009 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17009/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05977/) (2023)
- [Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13301/) (2023)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12908/) (2023)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05470/) (2025)
- [Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00704/) (2023)
- [Beyond the 80/20 Rule: High-Entropy Minority Tokens Drive Effective Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01939/) (2025)
- [Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13848/) (2024)
- [DanceGRPO: Unleashing GRPO on Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07818/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown strong potential for aligning generative models with human intent, but adapting RL to masked generative models (MGMs) remains largely underexplored. Existing approaches that directly adapt Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to MGMs leave a foundational conflict unaddressed: MGMs' exploitative decoding nature is inherently at odds with the exploratory diversity that GRPO presupposes. In this work, we reveal a structural decoding bias termed the visual exploration trap: confidence-based sampling trades the exploration of diverse subject realizations for the greedy resolution of low-uncertainty background regions, causing premature collapse of the generative exploration space and starving GRPO of the rollout diversity it depends on. To this end, we propose MaskSense, a novel RL framework for MGMs that confronts the visual exploration trap at both the sampling and optimization stages. Specifically, we introduce a semantic anchored routing sampling mechanism that leverages semantic priors to preserve high-entropy subject token exploration while amplifying intra-group reward variance through exploratory-exploitative routing to yield more discriminative advantage estimates. Furthermore, we design a global entropy transition anchoring strategy to identify the most consequential decoding steps and concentrate gradient updates on them. Extensive experiments on multiple text-to-image benchmarks demonstrate that MaskSense substantially improves upon the base model, with GenEval accuracy improving from 54% to 86% and HPS from 28.89 to 36.39, achieving state-of-the-art performance.