From Open Loop to Closed Loop: A Test-Time Iterative Optimization Framework for Reference-Consistent Image Generation

Baixuan Zhao, Xinyu Zhang, Huayu Zheng, Shuaicheng Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai, Xiaohong Liu

While controllable image generation has made significant strides by incorporating visual reference conditions, existing methods predominantly operate as open-loop systems. They inject control signals in a strictly feed-forward manner, failing to guarantee strict fidelity to the reference due to the absence of active feedback and error correction mechanisms. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose a novel test-time iterative optimization framework that reformulates reference-consistent generation as a closed-loop dynamic tracking problem. By treating the pre-trained generative model as a control plant, our framework employs a sensor-controller architecture driven by a modified Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) algorithm. This mechanism iteratively optimizes the latent control signals at test time based on the sensed discrepancy between the generated output and the reference target. Notably, this approach is entirely training-free, model-agnostic, and integrates seamlessly around existing diffusion pipelines. Extensive evaluations across ID-preserving, pose-controlled, and depth-controlled generation tasks validate the universality of our method. Empirical results demonstrate improvements over computation-matched open-loop baselines, achieving relative performance gains of up to 25.36\% for facial similarity, alongside spatial error reductions of up to 27.71\% for pose alignment and 28.50\% for depth consistency. More broadly, this work offers a new conceptual perspective: it demonstrates that controllable generation can be effectively managed as a dynamic feedback system, bringing the rigorous principles of classical control theory into the optimization of generative models. Code is available at https://github.com/zzdrill/From-Open-Loop-to-Closed-Loop.