SHIFT: Steering Hidden Intermediates in Flow Transformers

Text-to-image diffusion transformers (DiTs) are powerful generators, yet direct prompting provides limited control interface for style intensity and can fail to suppress unwanted concepts. To enable these controls, we introduce AcFlow, an inference-time controller that transports intermediate layer image-token activations through a learned concept-conditioned velocity field while keeping the base DiT frozen. A textual concept description specifies the desired intervention, while the integration horizon provides a continuous control parameter. The field produces token-varying, activation-dependent updates. With parameters shared across concepts within each task family, one field covers over 15,000 style descriptions or over 1,000 suppression concepts, and generalizes to concepts unseen during training without per-concept fitting. On style control, AcFlow achieves the best style--content trade-off among the evaluated baselines in the high-style-alignment regime. At a fixed operating point, AcFlow attains style--content alignment of 0.5365/0.2860, compared with 0.4397/0.2684 for the baseline with the highest style alignment. On concept suppression, AcFlow reduces the fraction of images showing the concept from 95.3%/82.1% to 41.6%/40.5% on held-in/held-out concepts, including cases where deleting them from the prompt fails to remove them. Our analyses support the learned velocity field as an adaptive control mechanism, with update directions varying across tokens and depending on their activation states. Our code is available at https://github.com/Nove1yst/AcFlow.

Text-to-image diffusion models have two major drawbacks that severely limit their practical utility: (1) standard models lack an intrinsic mechanism for continuous, concept-specific guidance (e.g., for precisely controlling how aesthetically pleasing an image looks), and (2) they lack reliability for tasks requiring high local coherence (e.g., generating text or human hands). To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel notion of concept-wise mutual information and find large, concept-dependent differences between individual layers, demonstrating that the generation of specific structures is localized in distinct parts of the network. We exploit this insight by reinforcing the impact of concept-relevant layers in Concept Guidance (CoG), a precise, target-specific guidance method that works for models out-of-the-box without additional training, external models, gradients, or prompt engineering. CoG first quantifies each layer's concept-specific impact and then guides denoising using a weighted combination of predictions generated with concept-relevant layers skipped. We demonstrate performance increases across various targets and popular models like PixArt-alpha, SD3, SD3.5, and FLUX.1-dev. Code is available at https://github.com/CompVis/concept_guidance

Text-to-image diffusion models can generate individual concepts well, but they often omit or merge concepts incorrectly with multiple concepts. We trace these failures to an early coordination bottleneck: before denoising begins, prompt-conditioned attention may allocate different concepts to strongly overlapping spatial support, which can keep their attention coupled as denoising proceeds. This observation motivates treating compositional generation as a boundary-condition problem rather than repeatedly controlling the evolving trajectory. To this end, we propose Rectify-then-Diffuse (RTD), a training-free framework that rectifies the initial allocation once before standard denoising. Firstly, we propose Soft-Overlap Disentanglement (SOD), which converts normalized overlap between pilot concept maps into a differentiable and layout-agnostic separation objective. Secondly, we introduce Isotropic Gradient Rectification (IGR), which normalizes the SOD gradient and applies a bounded latent displacement with a consistent scale across prompts and initializations. Extensive experiments show that RTD achieves state-of-the-art compositional fidelity and robust gains. On the AE-Bench object pair subset, RTD improves BLIP-VQA by 45.8% and ImageReward by 19.6% over CO3 while running 2.3$\times$ faster. Code will be released at https://github.com/Z-yiwei/rectify-then-diffuse