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Explorative Modeling: Unlocking a Third Pretraining Axis and End-to-End Generation

arXiv:2607.27372LGAICL29 jul 20261 min readHN ×5PDF

Generate K guesses during training, learn only from the closest, and blurry averages turn into sharp samples.

4.1×

fewer FLOPs

FLOP efficiency from exploration

Reaches the strongest image recipe's best score with far less compute

How it works

  1. Averages blur modes

    When one input could map to many valid outputs, squared-error training predicts their mean, which matches no real sample.

  2. Best-of-K training

    Each step, generate K candidates from different noise, compare to the data, and backpropagate only through the closest one.

  3. New scaling knob

    Raising K improves image, video and language models, and lets one-pass policies match 100-step diffusion.

K candidatescomparegradientData sampleK noiselatentsGeneratorPick closestUpdateon bestK candidatescomparegradientData sampleK noiselatentsGeneratorPick closestUpdateon best
From the paper