cs.CVDec 9, 2025

Early Estimation of Language to Latent Alignment in Diffusion Models

Authors: Vasco RamosRegev CohenIdan SzpektorJoao Magalhaes

Organizations: NOVALINCS, NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal · Google Research

Abstract

Conditional diffusion models frequently suffer from language-image misalignments. Due to the ambiguity of intermediate noise corrupted latents, assessing prompt adherence currently requires completing the entire sampling trajectory. This late-stage evaluation incurs even higher computational costs during test-time scaling strategies, such as Best-of-N (BoN) sampling, as all misaligned trajectories must finish generation before being discarded. To tackle this, we propose NoisyCLIP, a noise-aware twin-tower model that enables early language-to-latent alignment estimation. By learning a vision encoder on noise-corrupted latents, we allow the model to "see" through the ambiguity of intermediate diffusion steps. To facilitate this training, we investigate noise-data augmentation sampling strategies and introduce two new benchmark datasets: Noisy-Conceptual-Captions and Noisy-GenAI-Bench. When applied as an early-stopping criterion for BoN, NoisyCLIP at half cost matches or beats frozen CLIP at full cost. Ultimately, this transforms alignment assessment from an expensive final check into a continuous monitoring tool, drastically reducing compute costs without sacrificing semantic fidelity.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. DiLaDiff: Distilled Latent-Augmented Diffusion for Language Modeling

    May 22, 2026Jean-Marie Lemercier, Tomas Geffner, Karsten Kreis +3Diffusion Language Models