Image generation models produce identical faces because training objectives focus on realism and prompt matching but do not explicitly encourage identity diversity — adding diversity as an optimization objective via reinforcement learning solves this.
DISCO addresses the problem of models generating identical faces by adding diversity as an explicit optimization objective through reinforcement learning, achieving 98-99% unique face accuracy versus much lower scores from base models. ✦ AI generated
Fatih Porikli · The TWIML AI Podcast · 2026-08-12 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 6:34
“Talk through this paper about diversity of facial attributes.”
This is not an image quality problem, the problem that I mentioned before like we are asking the model to generate faces and certain number of faces and it keeps generating same faces identical almost identical faces over and over again. So quality wise, image quality wise, if you look at the pixels and noise and everything, it looks realistic. But the missing piece was that those models, base models, amazing models had not really learned to create truly distinct identities because existing training objectives focus heavily on the realism and matching the user prompt, but they don't explicitly encourage diversity between people and that is very important. So that observation led us to a simple question what if the identity or facial appearance or any diversity itself becomes an optimization objective.
verbatim transcript · starts at 6:34
6:34our own models also what was interesting that uh this is not an image quality problem the problem that I mentioned before like we are asking the model to generate faces and and certain number of faces and it keeps generating same faces identical almost identical faces over and over again. So quality wise, image quality wise, if you look at the pixels and noise and everything, it looks realistic. But the m missing piece was
7:02that those models, base models, amazing models had not really learned to create truly distinct identities because uh existing training objectives focus heavily on the realism and matching the user prompt, but they don't explicitly encourage diversity. uh between people and that is very important. So that observation led us to uh a simple question what if the identity or facial appearance or any diversity you know kind of itself
7:38becomes an optimization objective. So that led into the idea behind disco. Instead of you know creating a completely new T2I model, we kept the underlying model and fine-tune it with reinforcement learning. Um we designed rewards that encourage several things simultaneously. For instance, different people within an image should have distinct identities. You don't want to, you know, kind of duplicate create duplicate faces. That's something we call in the paper as intraim image
- ·Image models keep generating nearly identical faces
- ·Pixel-level quality is realistic — but faces lack distinct identity
- ·Base models never learned to create truly distinct identities
- ·Training optimizes realism and prompt matching, not diversity between people
- ·Existing loss functions ignore identity variation
- ·Prompt-matching rewards sameness across generations
- ·No explicit signal encourages distinct facial appearances
- ·Diversity itself was never part of the optimization target
- ·Reinforcement learning adds diversity as explicit optimization goal
- ·Achieves 98-99% unique face accuracy in generated outputs
- ·Base models score significantly lower without diversity objective
- ·Simple fix — make identity variation a trainable objective