Generative Vision Interview Questions, issue 5, Jun 12, 2026
The Mode Ascent Trap
Senior AI Engineer interview at Midjourney, and the interviewer asks:
“Your score estimator loss is perfectly converged after 400 hours on an A100 cluster. But during inference, deterministically following the gradient generates the exact same 3 hyper-average images on repeat. Why?”
Why your perfectly converged score estimator silently collapses into hyper-average outputs, and how injecting calibrated stochastic noise forces the model to explore the full distribution instead of
The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.