Anima DAVE (after compile)

The problem this exists for

Run Anima for more than an afternoon and you'll hit it: the same prompt, ten seeds, and nine of them give you the same composition with a slightly different face. Anima is genuinely good at seed-to-seed variation - one of the reasons people moved off Illustrious - but for any given prompt there's still one dominant layout the model keeps falling back to.

Anima DAVE (it shows up in the menu as "Anima DAVE (after compile)") is a training-free patch from the ICML 2026 paper Breaking the Lock-in: Diversifying Text-to-Image Generation via Representation Modulation, built to break that lock. It slots between your model loader and sampler, touches nothing else, and costs you almost nothing to try.

How it works

DAVE stands for DC Attenuation for diVersity Enhancement. Inside a DiT like Anima's Cosmos-predict2 backbone, a block's output splits into a DC component - the per-channel spatial average, which carries the global layout and conditioning and is near-identical across seeds - and an AC residual (output minus average) that holds the seed-specific structure. DAVE attenuates the DC of the early-mid blocks over only the first tau fraction of denoising steps, so the AC gets room to breathe without being rewritten:

ĥ = h − (1 − α)·μ

It's a MODEL patch, not a sampler or latent node, and the distinction matters: the edit happens on per-block intermediate features gated by per-step sigma, and neither is reachable from a sampler. The node clones your model, installs an APPLY_MODEL wrapper, and registers a post-forward hook on each pooled block that subtracts (1−α)·μ, tearing the hooks down after every apply_model call so nothing leaks across runs. It's a faithful port of the DAVE reference implementation - bit-for-bit identical math on ComfyUI's native 5D block output.

The knobs that matter

Three inputs, one output, and you'll set the two floats then forget the rest.

• model - your loaded Anima MODEL, straight from the loader. Output is also a MODEL, wired into your KSampler.
• mask - the per-block pool mask w(ℓ). The shipped dave_alpha.npz is flat over blocks 8–18, the early-mid structural band. Leave it alone unless you know why you're changing it.
• strength - the DC-removal dose, default 0.30, range 0–1. This is not a "more = stronger" knob. The pooled blocks set overall structure, so even a small dose reshuffles layout, and the diversity effect actually peaks low, around 0.05–0.20. 0.30 is the safe all-round default; ~0.80 knocks out the most DC at tau=0.10; 0 disables the node.
• tau - the fraction of early, high-σ steps DAVE is active, default 0.10.

Here's the one rule the author hammers: window width hurts more than dose. Text and hands stay legible at tau=0.10 even at strength=0.80, but at tau=0.15 even 0.50 starts garbling them. Tighten tau first, then spend any remaining headroom on strength. For fresh layouts, sweep strength low (0.05 → 0.2) at tau=0.10; for maximum DC removed, 0.80 at tau=0.10. Avoid tau ≥ 0.15 entirely.

Install

ComfyUI Manager: search "Anima DAVE" (pack title "Anima DAVE (Diversity)") and install. Or the old-fashioned way:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/sorryhyun/ComfyUI-Anima-DAVE comfyui-anima-dave

Then restart ComfyUI. No extra dependencies - torch and numpy ship with ComfyUI, and the block mask is bundled in the repo, so there are no model files to hunt down. This is about as clean an install as a custom node gets.

Wiring, and the "(after compile)" in the name

The display name is telling you where it lives. Basic wiring:

UNETLoader → Anima DAVE → KSampler

If you also use Anima Block Compile from the same author, DAVE must come after it:

UNETLoader → Anima Block Compile → Anima DAVE → KSampler

Why: patcher wrappers nest in wiring order, and DAVE's hooks need to land on the live compiled blocks. Wire it before Block Compile and it silently no-ops - fails safe, no corruption, but also no diversity. If your outputs look unchanged, check the order first.

What you'll actually hit

• Nothing changed at all - strength is at 0, or you wired DAVE before Block Compile. Check the order first.
• Text or hands garbled - you pushed tau past 0.15. Drop it back to 0.10.
• Exotic custom sampler - DAVE reads the live sigma schedule from transformer_options to decide the tau gate. A sampler that doesn't publish the schedule falls back to running every step, same as tau=0 - the likely culprit if text degrades on a niche sampler.
• CFG - the edit applies uniformly to the cond and uncond forwards, so no special CFG handling needed.

Is it essential? No - if you've never noticed your Anima layouts collapsing across seeds, you probably don't need it. But if you generate grids to pick from, it's the difference between nine near-duplicates and a real spread, at the cost of one node and zero training.