OOD Generalization as a Bifurcation Problem

Abstract

Systematic out-of-distribution (OOD) generation remains a critical bottleneck for continuous-time generative models. While standard joint classifier-free guidance (CFG) routinely fails to synthesize unobserved concept combinations, exact decomposed scoring generalizes robustly at the cost of severe computational overhead. In this work, we reveal that compositional binding is not a uniform process but a highly localized phase transition. We identify the semantic bifurcation window - the precise temporal interval where joint and decomposed vector fields meaningfully diverge. Exploiting this dynamic, we propose surgical guidance, a hybrid sampling strategy that restricts exact multi-pass scoring strictly to this critical window. On an OOD bi-digit MNIST testbed, surgical guidance achieves state-of-the-art compositional fidelity at a fraction of the inference cost, yielding a +5.3% absolute improvement in pairwise accuracy over the joint baseline by intervening during just the first 15% of the diffusion trajectory. Furthermore, our empirical analysis uncovers a fundamental topological divide: diffusion models (SDEs) force conceptual resolution immediately at peak noise, whereas Conditional Flow Matching (ODEs) delays structural binding until intermediate features emerge, establishing a new temporal framework for accelerating large-scale generative decoding.