Diffusion Model Adaptation

Latest papers

25 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Oct 4, 2026

D-DOIT: Training-free Adaptation of Discrete Diffusion via Doob's h-Transform

We propose D-DOIT (Discrete Doob-Oriented Inference-time Transformation), a training-free and efficient adaptation method for discrete diffusion models with generic rewards. D-DOIT formulates adaptation as sampling from a reward-tilted target distribution and realizes this transport through Doob's h-transform of the discrete diffusion reverse kernel, using only reward values rather than reward gradients. Unlike continuous diffusion, masked discrete diffusion samples categorical token-reveal transitions rather than continuous state updates. D-DOIT derives the corresponding discrete Doob's h-transform, which guides sampling by reweighting reverse transition probabilities instead of adding a drift correction. To make this transformation practical, D-DOIT avoids expensive future rollouts. At each guided step, D-DOIT samples candidate next states, uses the model prediction head to complete each candidate into a clean sequence, evaluates each completion with the reward oracle, and resamples the next state with probabilities proportional to the rewards. An optional late-stage best-of-K refinement further improves sample quality by branching trajectories only near the end of denoising, avoiding the KK-fold cost over the full trajectory. Empirically, across regulatory DNA design and protein inverse folding benchmarks, D-DOIT outperforms training-free guidance baselines. It improves enhancer activity and cell-type specificity while preserving sequence naturalness, and achieves the highest success rate in protein inverse folding.
Sep 24, 2026

Diffu-LoRA: A Novel Low-Rank Adaptation for Personalized Diffusion Models

Personalizing text-to-image diffusion models from a few reference images requires preserving subject identity while following prompts that describe new contexts. Full-model fine-tuning is parameter-intensive, whereas low-rank adaptation (LoRA) reduces the number of trainable parameters but leaves open how adaptation capacity should be distributed across layers. We introduce Diffu-LoRA, a parameter-efficient method that learns this allocation through gated low-rank adaptation. Diffu-LoRA inserts trainable low-rank components into the linear layers of Transformer blocks and assigns a learnable gate to each component. Bilevel optimization updates the adaptation weights and gate parameters on separate data splits, while progressive pruning removes components with the lowest gate values to meet a prescribed rank budget. This procedure allocates adaptation capacity nonuniformly across layers while keeping the pretrained backbone frozen. Experiments with Stable Diffusion on subjects from DreamBooth and additional collected datasets show improved overall subject fidelity and prompt alignment relative to the evaluated fine-tuning baselines. Ablation studies examine the contributions of bilevel optimization, progressive pruning, and adapter placement. These results support learned rank allocation as a practical approach to parameter-efficient diffusion model personalization.
Sep 17, 2026

dQwen3.5: Hybrid-Attention Diffusion Language Models

Adapting a pretrained autoregressive (AR) model is a cost-efficient route to a diffusion language model (DLM). While nearly all such adaptations start from a full-attention transformer, AR modeling has shifted toward hybrid architectures that interleave attention and RNN layers. This creates an obstacle for adaptation: unlike attention, RNNs are structurally causal and nontrivial to bidirectionalize. Despite this mismatch, we investigate whether such backbones can become effective DLMs by adapting Qwen3.5 at 0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 9B scales, yielding the dQwen3.5 family. We find that hybrid backbones can be efficient starting points for adaptation: against a full-attention control, the hybrid reaches a given training loss in about half the tokens. Across scales, dQwen3.5 resembles full-attention DLMs in any-order decoding behavior and performs strongly under parallel decoding.
Sep 17, 2026

STAR: Structure-aware Test-time Adaptation for diffusion-based light field Reconstruction

Light field (LF) reconstruction from limited and noisy focal stack (FS) measurements is a highly ill-posed inverse problem. Although the LF-to-FS imaging geometry is fixed for a given optical setup, LF spatial-angular structure---including within-view spatial details, cross-view angular dependencies, and disparity across views---varies across scenes. Consequently, a fixed pre-trained prior may not optimally capture the spatial-angular structure of each test LF. We propose Structure-aware Test-time Adaptation for diffusion-based light field Reconstruction (STAR), the first test-time adaptation framework for reconstructing an LF from FS. For each test LF, STAR freezes a pre-trained diffusion prior and fits three lightweight adapters to the observed FS to jointly adapt the three components of the LF's spatial-angular structure. STAR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both two- and three-focal-sheet settings, with shorter inference times than those with test-time parameter updates.
Aug 20, 2026

Continuous Adversarial MeanFlow Transfer

Training fast generators on new domains with limited data remains challenging for two reasons. First, adapting a pretrained diffusion or flow model to a new domain leaves its costly multi-step sampling unaddressed, and existing acceleration methods are tied to the source parameterization--εε, xx, vv, or uu--leaving heterogeneous pretrained models with no common acceleration target. Second, while adversarial refinement is proven effective for few-step quality, it is formulated only for instantaneous-velocity flows, not for the finite-interval average velocities that MeanFlow (MF) models predict. We address both problems. We propose MeanFlow-Transfer, which maps heterogeneous source outputs into a shared velocity representation, uses it to initialize an MF generator from the source weights, and optimizes an MF objective on the target domain. This unifies adaptation and acceleration in a single training loop across a broad range of pretrained models. We then introduce Continuous Adversarial MeanFlow, a post-training stage that extends continuous adversarial flow models from instantaneous velocities to MF's finite-interval average velocities. CAMF contrasts changes in a learned potential between real and predicted interval endpoints, recovering fine detail that MF regression averages away, and reduces to the instantaneous criterion in the vanishing-interval limit. Adapting four ImageNet-based source models--DiT (εε), SiT (vv), JiT (xx), iMF (uu)--to five target domains, MF-T with CAMF matches or exceeds the fine-tuned teacher in FID and FDD at up to 125×125\times fewer Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs), while CAMF improves MF-T's few-step FID by 29%29\% on average.
Aug 10, 2026

In-Loop Model Adaptation with Coupled Latent-Noise Guidance for High-Fidelity Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality images from a given text prompt. Subject-driven generation aims to synthesize customized images to mimic the appearance of subjects in given reference images within different visual contexts specified by the text prompts. The central challenge here is that, when the reference image changes, the diffusion model cannot efficiently adapt to different visual contexts while consistently maintaining the subject identity. Existing methods either train the model with a large domain-specific dataset or fine-tune the model using the reference image for hundreds of iterations before actual image generation. In this work, we explore a new approach, called In-Loop Model Adaptation (IMA), which adapts the core diffusion model at each generation step during the actual process of image generation, without being trained on the reference image before the generation process. To this end, we establish a DDIM inversion chain that maps the reference image to a sequence of latent, as well as a text-to-image generation chain which generates the image from the text prompt only. We then introduce a masked latent consistency loss and a noise regularization loss to characterize the latent-noise difference between the diffusion model and these two chains at each generation step. This coupled latent-noise loss is used to guide the in-loop model adaptation to preserve the subject identity specified by the reference image while maintaining accurate alignment with the text prompt, resulting in high-fidelity text-to-image generation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed IMA method significantly improves the performance of subject-driven text-to-image generation.
Aug 7, 2026

HRDiT: Training-Free High-Resolution Image Generation with Off-the-Shelf Diffusion Transformer Models

Training-free text-to-high-resolution image generation has recently attracted growing research attention. However, existing studies on this task primarily focus on adapting off-the-shelf U-Net-based diffusion models to high resolutions, with limited progress on adapting off-the-shelf Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models despite their strong text-to-image generation capabilities at limited resolutions. In this work, we find two key challenges particularly hindering the application of off-the-shelf DiT models for high-resolution image synthesis in a training-free manner, namely, spatial disorder and long generation time. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method tailored to adapt off-the-shelf DiT models for high-resolution image synthesis. Extensive experiments show the efficacy of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zylwithxy/HRDiT.
Jul 27, 2026

UNIFUSION: Adapting Autoregressive Language Models into Discrete Diffusion under a Unified Reverse-Rate Objective

Existing methods mainly adapt pretrained autoregressive (AR) language models to masked diffusion, whereas we directly adapt them to uniform-noise diffusion, where every token remains editable during sampling. However, adapting AR checkpoints across corruption kernels remains challenging because existing DLMs use different objectives and prediction parameterizations. We establish connections among SEDD, MDLM/GIDD, M2S, and Neural CTMC by expressing their conditional losses as a single generalized Kullback--Leibler objective over model reverse rates. We further derive conversions from clean-token predictions to concrete-score, posterior-mean, and exit-rate/jump parameterizations, yielding a shared x0x_0 interface that supports switching between mask and uniform kernels. Building on these connections, we propose \ours{}, a simple continual pre-training approach for directly adapting pretrained GPT2 checkpoints to uniform-noise diffusion. Through systematic evaluation of 124M- and 355M-parameter models, we show that \ours{} steadily improves the trade-off between generative perplexity (GenPPL) and unigram entropy as the sampling budget increases from 16 to 256 steps. At 256 steps, \ours{}-S and \ours{}-M achieve GenPPL/entropy pairs of 97.783/5.262697.783/5.2626 and 71.516/5.666971.516/5.6669, respectively; no evaluated model at the same scale simultaneously outperforms \ours{} on both metrics. At both scales, \ours{} also achieves the highest WinoGrande, SIQA, and BBH accuracy among the compared diffusion models.
Jul 23, 2026

Source-Prior-Driven Selective Adaptation for Efficient Diffusion Model Finetuning

Fine-tuning large diffusion models for new domains or styles involves a trade-off: improving target-specific generation often degrades the pretrained model's broad generative capability. Existing full and parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods typically handle this trade-off only implicitly. In this work, we propose a novel source-prior-driven selective adaptation method to efficiently fine-tune diffusion models, achieving a favorable trade-off. Our method relies on two key observations: (1) the loss of general generative capability is highly inconsistent across pretrained parameters, and (2) parameters that have a relatively small impact on the model's general generative capability remain structurally inconsistent across layers and parameter types. Motivated by these observations, we first learn a static mask to explicitly identify parameters better suited for downstream adaptation, and then construct structured update strategies for the selected subset. Experiments show that our method achieves a better adaptation-retention trade-off than existing strong baselines.
Jul 7, 2026

FADRA: Frequency-Aware Diffusion with Residual Adaptation for Video Face Restoration

Video face restoration (VFR) aims to recover high-quality and temporally consistent facial details from severely degraded video sequences; however, existing methods still struggle to balance spatial fidelity and temporal coherence under complex degradations. To address this, we propose FADRA, a frequency-aware diffusion framework with iterative residual adaptation specifically tailored for robust VFR. We first leverage the strong temporal consistency of a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion model and introduce lightweight LoRA adapters together with a Low-Quality (LQ) Pixel-Alignment Feature Fusion module to efficiently adapt the frozen generative prior to the VFR task. To further adapt the frozen diffusion backbone to the downstream VFR task beyond LoRA-based adaptation, we introduce a Repeated Residual Adaptation Head (RRAH) for step-wise residual refinement after the diffusion backbone. To make this refinement explicitly guided by the degraded observation, RRAH further takes the LQ latent together with the current velocity prediction as input, allowing the model to repeatedly revisit LQ cues and predict residual updates at each flow-matching step. This LQ-guided repeated residual adaptation helps recover fine facial details while preserving the inherent temporal priors of the pre-trained model. Furthermore, to ensure the structural integrity of perceptually important details, we introduce a Frequency-Aware Loss that provides explicit supervision across multiple spectral bands, emphasizing visually sensitive frequency components that are crucial for perceptual quality and prone to temporal jittering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FADRA recovers better facial structures and produces more temporally consistent videos than state-of-the-art methods, leading to clear gains in both quantitative metrics and visual perception. Our project page is available.
Jul 6, 2026

LILAC: Layer-Wise Independent LoRAs and Cascaded Conditioning for Multi-Concept Customization of Diffusion Models

Personalizing text-to-image diffusion models to render several specific subjects in a coherent image remains challenging: the model must preserve each subject's identity while keeping the scene spatially and visually coherent. Methods that fuse independently trained concept adapters in a shared weight space (via federated averaging, gradient fusion, or orthogonality constraints) suffer from identity confusion and style bleeding. In this work, we show that composing concepts as separate image layers, instead of merging their adapters in a shared weight space, avoids parameter-level interference. We introduce LILAC, a framework that composes independently trained low-rank adapters at inference time: each subject is conditioned on the frozen composite of previously placed subjects, with exactly one adapter active at a time, therefore identities never interfere at the parameter level. LILAC composes the adapters without joint training, scales linearly with the number of concepts, and is backbone-agnostic. Under the Orthogonal Adaptation protocol, LILAC applied on Qwen-Image-Edit+Qwen-Image-Layered reaches an ArcFace detection rate of 0.861. Code is available at https://github.com/marianlupascu/LILAC.
Jun 30, 2026

DriftScope: Measuring The Hidden Effects of Diffusion Model Adaptation

Adapting pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, whether to learn new visual concepts or erase unwanted ones, is routinely evaluated on its intended effects alone. We argue this framing is incomplete. Through sparse autoencoder analysis and zero-shot classification, we demonstrate that adaptation systematically damages semantically unrelated concepts in ways that aggregate metrics structurally cannot surface: when damage is severe enough for FID and KID to respond, the model is already nearly unusable; when the model remains functional, FID and KID stay flat while specific classes silently suffer worst-case zero-shot accuracy drops of up to 18.9 points and concept-level distributions shift dramatically. This pattern appears at both ends of the adaptation spectrum (concept customization and concept unlearning), suggesting it is a systematic consequence of weight-level modification rather than an artifact of any particular method. To surface this hidden drift before deployment, we introduce DriftScope, a prompt-level diagnostic tool that takes any two model checkpoints and returns a ranked list of tokens whose visual concepts have shifted most between them. DriftScope optimizes a soft prompt to attribute drift at the token level without requiring access to real data or model internals. The result is an interpretable, concept-level audit that aggregate evaluation cannot provide.
Jun 18, 2026

UNITY: Attention Flow Networks for Adaptive Conditioning in Diffusion

We introduce UNITY, a Universal-to-Specialized adapter for efficient and scalable composite conditioning in diffusion based image generation. Unlike prior methods that train separate adapters for each conditioning modality, UNITY jointly learns shared semantics across multiple conditioning types and subsequently specializes without modifying the underlying architecture. The proposed two stage training paradigm consists of a Universal Stage that captures cross modal representations across all conditioning modalities using half of the total training steps, followed by a Specialization Stage that refines modality specific features using the remaining training budget. At the core of UNITY are the Morphable Attention Flow (MAF) Network and Morph Wrapper modules, which enable channel aware and spatially adaptive feature alignment through learnable flow fields and attention based fusion. This constant complexity formulation supports flexible operation under both single and composite conditioning settings while significantly reducing inference latency and memory consumption. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that UNITY achieves state of the art image fidelity while maintaining superior memory efficiency. Code: https://github.com/arya-domain/UNITY
Jun 11, 2026

A2D2: Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding

Discrete diffusion models offer a simple and stable likelihood-based framework for sequence generation, recently extended to any-length settings via token insertion. Principled reward-guided fine-tuning for any-length discrete diffusion, however, remains largely unexplored. We introduce Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding (A2D2), a unified framework for reward-guided fine-tuning of any-length discrete diffusion models via joint optimization of the insertion and unmasking policies together with a quality-based inference schedule. We derive the Radon-Nikodym derivative for the joint insertion-unmasking path measures, enabling theoretically guaranteed convergence to the intractable reward-tilted sequence distribution without requiring target samples. Building on this, we establish unmasking and insertion quality as tractable approaches for minimizing decoding error and introduce the Adaptive Joint Decoding (AJD) loss, which provably yields the optimal path measure that generates the reward-tilted distribution. Empirically, A2D2 improves reward optimization while enhancing generation flexibility and accuracy over prior fixed-length fine-tuning and inference-time guidance methods.
May 20, 2026

Hierarchical Variational Policies for Reward-Guided Diffusion

Adapting pretrained diffusion models to downstream objectives such as inverse problems often requires expensive test-time guidance or optimization. We propose a principled framework for generating high-quality reward-aligned samples at substantially reduced inference cost. Our approach formulates test-time adaptation as a hierarchical variational model, where control is amortized into a lightweight yet expressive stochastic policy. This formulation naturally supports few-step diffusion sampling: large step sizes enable fast inference, while the learned policy maintains sample quality by providing structured per-step control. The resulting fully amortized sampler achieves a strong quality--speed tradeoff, matching or exceeding recent test-time scaling baselines while requiring significantly less compute. For example, on 4x super-resolution, our method achieves better perceptual quality with more than 5x faster inference compared to the best-performing baseline. We further extend our approach to a semi-amortized regime that combines cheap amortized proposals with limited test-time optimization, achieving state-of-the-art perceptual quality across several challenging inverse problems.
May 18, 2026

Generation of Heterogeneous PET Images from Uniform Organ Activity Maps Using a Pretrained Domain-Adapted Diffusion Model

Synthetic PET images are valuable for quantitative imaging workflow development, scalable virtual imaging trials, and deep learning model training, but conventional physics-based simulation approaches are computationally intensive, limited in anatomical variability, and often fail to capture heterogeneous PET uptake. This study developed a pretrained domain-adapted diffusion (PAD) model for anatomy-conditioned PET synthesis from uniform organ activity maps. PAD adopts a natural-image pretrained text-to-image decoder with an upstream conditioning encoder and a downstream PET-domain adapter. A two-phase training strategy was used, with the first phase learning coarse uptake distributions and the second refining local image details. Uniform organ activity maps were generated from CT-based segmentations by assigning each organ its mean uptake from the paired PET image. Evaluation included quantitative accuracy, noise assessment, radiomic analysis, tumor segmentation performance, and a human observer study. PAD-generated images achieved high quantitative accuracy, with concordance correlation coefficients above 0.92 between organ mean SUVs and assigned activity values. The synthesized images showed noise levels and texture characteristics similar to target PET images and produced comparable tumor segmentation performance. In a two-alternative forced-choice observer study, four readers achieved approximately 50% accuracy, indicating visual indistinguishability between synthesized and target images. PAD also generated realistic PET images from XCAT-derived activity maps, demonstrating compatibility with phantom-based anatomical priors. Overall, PAD provides a diffusion-based framework for generating clinically relevant heterogeneous PET images from uniform organ activity maps derived from clinical segmentations or digital phantoms, supporting data augmentation and downstream imaging studies.
May 12, 2026

Efficient Adjoint Matching for Fine-tuning Diffusion Models

Reward fine-tuning has become a common approach for aligning pretrained diffusion and flow models with human preferences in text-to-image generation. Among reward-gradient-based methods, Adjoint Matching (AM) provides a principled formulation by casting reward fine-tuning as a stochastic optimal control (SOC) problem. However, AM inevitably requires a substantial computational cost: it requires (i) stochastic simulation of full generative trajectories under memoryless dynamics, resulting in a large number of function evaluations, and (ii) backward ODE simulation of the adjoint state along each sampled trajectory. In this work, we observe that both bottlenecks are closely tied to the non-trivial base drift inherited from the pretrained model. Motivated by this observation, we propose Efficient Adjoint Matching (EAM), which substantially improves training efficiency by reformulating the SOC problem with a linear base drift and a correspondingly modified terminal cost. This reformulation removes both sources of inefficiency; it enables training-time sampling with a few-step deterministic ODE solver and yields a closed-form adjoint solution that eliminates backward adjoint simulation. On standard text-to-image reward fine-tuning benchmarks, EAM converges up to 4x faster than AM and matches or surpasses it across various metrics including PickScore, ImageReward, HPSv2.1, CLIPScore and Aesthetics.
Apr 27, 2026

AD-Relight: Training-Free Banner Relighting via Illumination Translation with Diffusion Priors

The recent surge in content consumption through streaming services has driven a growing demand for personalized content. Personalized advertisements (ads) play a crucial role in enhancing both user engagement and ad effectiveness. A key aspect of ad personalization involves replacing existing regions in a frame with custom, Photoshop-generated banners. However, existing ad-placement pipelines typically rely on simple geometric warping, ignoring the scene's underlying lighting conditions. Similarly, state-of-the-art diffusion-based object insertion and relighting models struggle to accurately relight these newly inserted banners, as they are not trained on ad-banner data, and training such a model for ad banners would require millions of images. This highlights the need for an effective relighting framework that enables seamless integration of custom banners into the original scene. Motivated by this, we present AD-Relight, a novel multi-stage training-free framework that adapts a diffusion-based relighting model at test time to relight newly added Photoshop-generated ad banners. Through extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that AD-Relight outperforms both relighting baselines and existing ad-placement methods based on simple warping. User studies further show that participants consistently prefer the outputs of AD-Relight over those of prior approaches.
Apr 6, 2026

OrthoFuse: Training-free Riemannian Fusion of Orthogonal Style-Concept Adapters for Diffusion Models

In a rapidly growing field of model training there is a constant practical interest in parameter-efficient fine-tuning and various techniques that use a small amount of training data to adapt the model to a narrow task. However, there is an open question: how to combine several adapters tuned for different tasks into one which is able to yield adequate results on both tasks? Specifically, merging subject and style adapters for generative models remains unresolved. In this paper we seek to show that in the case of orthogonal fine-tuning (OFT), we can use structured orthogonal parametrization and its geometric properties to get the formulas for training-free adapter merging. In particular, we derive the structure of the manifold formed by the recently proposed Group-and-Shuffle (GS\mathcal{GS}) orthogonal matrices, and obtain efficient formulas for the geodesics approximation between two points. Additionally, we propose a spectra restoration\text{spectra restoration} transform that restores spectral properties of the merged adapter for higher-quality fusion. We conduct experiments in subject-driven generation tasks showing that our technique to merge two GS\mathcal{GS} orthogonal matrices is capable of uniting concept and style features of different adapters. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first training-free method for merging multiplicative orthogonal adapters. Code is available via the link.
Mar 23, 2026

Not All Layers Are Created Equal: Adaptive LoRA Ranks for Personalized Image Generation

Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is the de facto fine-tuning strategy to generate personalized images from pre-trained diffusion models. Choosing a good rank is extremely critical, since it trades off performance and memory consumption, but today the decision is often left to the community's consensus, regardless of the personalized subject's complexity. The reason is evident: the cost of selecting a good rank for each LoRA component is combinatorial, so we opt for practical shortcuts such as fixing the same rank for all components. In this paper, we take a first step to overcome this challenge. Inspired by variational methods that learn an adaptive width of neural networks, we let the ranks of each layer freely adapt during fine-tuning on a subject. We achieve it by imposing an ordering of importance on the rank's positions, effectively encouraging the creation of higher ranks when strictly needed. Qualitatively and quantitatively, our approach, LoRA2^2, achieves a competitive trade-off between DINO, CLIP-I, and CLIP-T across 29 subjects while requiring much less memory and lower rank than high rank LoRA versions. Code: https://github.com/donaldssh/NotAllLayersAreCreatedEqual.
Mar 7, 2026

Diffusion Controller: Framework, Algorithms and Parameterization

Controllable diffusion generation often relies on various heuristics that are seemingly disconnected without a unified understanding. We bridge this gap with Diffusion Controller (DiffCon), a unified control-theoretic view that casts reverse diffusion sampling as state-only stochastic control within (generalized) linearly-solvable Markov Decision Processes (LS-MDPs). Under this framework, control acts by reweighting the pretrained reverse-time transition kernels, balancing terminal objectives against an ff-divergence cost. From the resulting optimality conditions, we derive practical reinforcement learning methods for diffusion fine-tuning: (i) f-divergence-regularized policy-gradient updates, including a PPO-style rule, and (ii) a regularizer-determined reward-weighted regression objective with a minimizer-preservation guarantee under the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. The LS-MDP framework further implies a principled model form: the optimal score decomposes into a fixed pretrained baseline plus a lightweight control correction, motivating a side-network parameterization conditioned on exposed intermediate denoising outputs, enabling effective gray-box adaptation with a frozen backbone. Experiments on Stable Diffusion v1.4 across supervised and reward-driven finetuning show consistent gains in preference-alignment win rates and improved quality-efficiency trade-offs versus gray-box baselines and even the parameter-efficient white-box adapter LoRA.
Feb 18, 2026

Training-Free Adaptation of Diffusion Models via Doob's hh-Transform

Adaptation methods have been a workhorse for unlocking the transformative power of pre-trained diffusion models in diverse applications. Existing approaches often abstract adaptation objectives as a reward function and steer diffusion models to generate high-reward samples. However, these approaches can incur high computational overhead due to additional training, or rely on stringent assumptions on the reward such as differentiability. Moreover, despite their empirical success, theoretical justification and guarantees are seldom established. In this paper, we propose DOIT (Doob-Oriented Inference-time Transformation), a training-free and computationally efficient adaptation method that applies to generic, non-differentiable rewards. The key framework underlying our method is a measure transport formulation that seeks to transport the pre-trained generative distribution to a high-reward target distribution. We leverage Doob's hh-transform to realize this transport, which induces a dynamic correction to the diffusion sampling process and enables efficient simulation-based computation without modifying the pre-trained model. Theoretically, we establish a high probability convergence guarantee to the target high-reward distribution via characterizing the approximation error in the dynamic Doob's correction. Empirically, on D4RL offline RL benchmarks, our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while preserving sampling efficiency.
Feb 16, 2026

Efficient Text-Guided Convolutional Adapter for the Diffusion Model

We introduce the Nexus Adapters, novel text-guided efficient adapters to the diffusion-based framework for the Structure Preserving Conditional Generation (SPCG). Recently, structure-preserving methods have achieved promising results in conditional image generation by using a base model for prompt conditioning and an adapter for structure input, such as sketches or depth maps. These approaches are highly inefficient and sometimes require equal parameters in the adapter compared to the base architecture. It is not always possible to train the model since the diffusion model is itself costly, and doubling the parameter is highly inefficient. In these approaches, the adapter is not aware of the input prompt; therefore, it is optimal only for the structural input but not for the input prompt. To overcome the above challenges, we proposed two efficient adapters, Nexus Prime and Slim, which are guided by prompts and structural inputs. Each Nexus Block incorporates cross-attention mechanisms to enable rich multimodal conditioning. Therefore, the proposed adapter has a better understanding of the input prompt while preserving the structure. We conducted extensive experiments on the proposed models and demonstrated that the Nexus Prime adapter significantly enhances performance, requiring only 8M additional parameters compared to the baseline, T2I-Adapter. Furthermore, we also introduced a lightweight Nexus Slim adapter with 18M fewer parameters than the T2I-Adapter, which still achieved state-of-the-art results. Code: https://github.com/arya-domain/Nexus-Adapters
Nov 22, 2025

FeRA: Frequency-Energy Constrained Routing for Effective Diffusion Adaptation Fine-Tuning

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generative modeling, yet how to effectively adapt large pretrained models to new tasks remains challenging. We revisit the reconstruction behavior of diffusion models during denoising to unveil the underlying frequency energy mechanism governing this process. Building upon this observation, we propose FeRA, a frequency driven fine tuning framework that aligns parameter updates with the intrinsic frequency energy progression of diffusion. FeRA establishes a comprehensive frequency energy framework for effective diffusion adaptation fine tuning, comprising three synergistic components: (i) a compact frequency energy indicator that characterizes the latent bandwise energy distribution, (ii) a soft frequency router that adaptively fuses multiple frequency specific adapter experts, and (iii) a frequency energy consistency regularization that stabilizes diffusion optimization and ensures coherent adaptation across bands. Routing operates in both training and inference, with inference time routing dynamically determined by the latent frequency energy. It integrates seamlessly with adapter based tuning schemes and generalizes well across diffusion backbones and resolutions. By aligning adaptation with the frequency energy mechanism, FeRA provides a simple, stable, and compatible paradigm for effective and robust diffusion model adaptation.
Jan 22, 2025

Low-dimensional adaptation of diffusion models: Convergence in total variation

This paper investigates how diffusion generative models leverage (unknown) low-dimensional structure to accelerate sampling. Focusing on two mainstream samplers -- the denoising diffusion implicit model (DDIM) and the denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM), we prove that their iteration complexities under exact score functions are at most the order of k/εk/\varepsilon (up to log factor), where ε\varepsilon is the precision in total variation distance and kk is some intrinsic dimension of the target distribution. We further extend these convergence guarantees to the setting in which the score functions are learned from data rather than known exactly, showing that the convergence performance degrades gracefully under suitable score estimation assumptions. We then show that these assumptions are attainable via kernel-based score estimators with finite-sample guarantees that also adapt to the low-dimensional structure. Our results apply to a broad family of target distributions without requiring smoothness or log-concavity. Our findings provide the first rigorous evidence for the adaptivity of the DDIM-type samplers to unknown low-dimensional structure, and improve over the state-of-the-art DDPM theory regarding total variation convergence.