Overview

Diffusion model guidance studies how to steer reverse denoising so generated samples satisfy goals such as matching text or images, honoring observations, meeting physical or safety constraints, and avoiding unwanted content. Common approaches include classifier-free and classifier guidance, gradients from reward or measurement models, attention and representation edits, and particle-based methods such as sequential Monte Carlo and Doob h-transforms. These techniques are used across text-to-image and video generation, image restoration, molecular design, and robot planning, with evaluation ranging from compositional-alignment benchmarks to inverse-problem fidelity and task success. A central tension is that stronger or more elaborate guidance can improve control but also damage realism, diversity, or fidelity to the model’s learned distribution, while adding computation; no alternative to standard classifier-free guidance is consistently best across settings.

Latest papers

370 papers56 papers in the last four weeks, up 81% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Aug 14, 2025

Novel View Synthesis using DDIM Inversion

Single-image novel view synthesis requires viewpoint-dependent structural changes while retaining source-scene information and inferring unobserved content. We formulate this task as a camera-conditioned initialization problem for a frozen pretrained latent diffusion model. At an intermediate DDIM inversion timestep, we decompose the source representation into a structural mean and a source noise residual. A pose-conditioned translation U-Net (TUNet) learns to predict the target-view mean from the source mean. We then introduce a score-guided fusion strategy: the predicted mean and source noise residual form a proposal that is evaluated by the frozen denoiser, whose noise prediction is combined with the translated mean to initialize DDIM sampling. Only TUNet is trained, while the pretrained model synthesizes the final view without explicit reconstruction or rendering of a shared 3D scene. Experiments on MVImgNet and RealEstate10K demonstrate competitive performance. Beyond image-level metrics, Wasserstein comparisons show that the corrected initialization yields trajectory-curvature distributions closer to those of ground-truth target-initialized sampling than raw fusion. These results support structural translation and source-conditioned initialization as a practical approach to reusing frozen diffusion priors for novel view synthesis.
Jul 23, 2025

Detail++: Training-Free Detail Enhancer for T2I Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.
Jul 1, 2025

Guided Unconditional and Conditional Generative Models for Super-Resolution and Inference of Quasi-Geostrophic Turbulence

Typically, numerical simulations of Earth systems are coarse, and Earth observations are sparse and gappy. We apply four generative diffusion modeling approaches to super-resolution and inference of forced two-dimensional quasi-geostrophic turbulence on the beta-plane from coarse, sparse, and gappy observations. Two guided approaches minimally adapt a pre-trained unconditional model: SDEdit modifies the initial condition, and Diffusion Posterior Sampling (DPS) modifies the reverse diffusion process score. Two conditional approaches, a vanilla variant and classifier-free guidance, require training with paired high-resolution and observation data. We consider multiple test cases spanning: two regimes, eddy and anisotropic-jet turbulence; two Reynolds numbers, 10^3 and 10^4; and two observation types, 4x coarse-resolution fields and coarse, sparse and gappy observations. Our comprehensive skill metrics include norms of the reconstructed vorticity fields, turbulence statistical quantities, and quantifications of the super-resolved probabilistic ensembles and their errors. We also study the sensitivity to tuning parameters such as guidance strength. Results show that the generated super-resolution fields of SDEdit are unphysical, while those of DPS are reasonable but with smoothed fine-scale features; however, neither of these lower-cost models propagates observational information effectively to unobserved regions. The two conditional models require re-training, but reconstruct missing fine-scale features, are cycle-consistent with observations, and predict correct turbulence statistics, including the tails. Further, their mean errors are highly correlated with and predictable from their ensemble standard deviations. Results highlight the tradeoffs between ease of implementation, fidelity (sharpness), and cycle-consistency of the diffusion models, and offer practical guidance for deployment.
Jun 1, 2025

MoCA-Video: Motion-Aware Concept Alignment for Consistent Video Editing

Unlike traditional video editing or inpainting, video semantic mixing fuses a reference concept with a moving target entity to produce a hybrid while preserving the source video's motion and layout. We propose MoCA-Video, a training-free framework that steers a frozen video-diffusion denoising trajectory through concept-localized reference injection. At selected low-noise steps, MoCA-Video uses concept attention to localize the target object and injects the reference latent into the localized region, where object structure has formed but appearance remains editable. A momentum-based correction carries the injected prediction across frames to encourage coherent concept integration through the sequence. We further introduce CASS, a CLIP-based metric that measures the output's directional alignment shift toward the reference and away from the source prompt. Using the denoiser's internal attention avoids an external localization model; in our A100 FP16 setup, MoCA-Video takes 3.2 seconds per output frame, excluding preprocessing. Across the evaluated baselines, MoCA-Video achieves the highest CASS, rel-CASS, and ImageReward, while LPIPS-T and FVD expose separate temporal-coherence and video-quality trade-offs.
May 27, 2025

ISAC: Training-Free Instance-to-Semantic Attention Control for Multi-Instance Generation

Recent open-weight text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models still struggle with multi-instance prompts, often omitting or merging instances and mixing semantics among similar objects. We trace these failures to early denoising steps, before instance boundaries are reliably stabilized. Existing training-free guidance is largely driven by cross-attention or other token-conditioned semantic signals. Such guidance can separate concepts at the token level, but largely assumes that distinct instance regions have already emerged. In early denoising steps, it cannot reliably carve out these regions, so count failures and semantic mixing persist. By contrast, self-attention exposes class-agnostic instance layouts during early denoising. To exploit this asymmetry, we propose ISAC\textbf{ISAC} (I\textbf{I}nstance-to-S\textbf{S}emantic A\textbf{A}ttention C\textbf{C}ontrol), a training-free, model-agnostic objective that first stabilizes self-attention layouts and then binds cross-attention semantics within them, without fine-tuning or external vision models. Across T2I-CompBench, HRS-Bench, and our newly curated IntraCompBench, ISAC consistently outperforms prior training-free methods. Furthermore, ISAC enhances layout-to-image controllers by refining coarse, overlapping bounding boxes into dense instance masks. Code and IntraCompBench are available at https://shjo-april.github.io/ISAC.
Feb 6, 2025

DICE: Distilling Classifier-Free Guidance into Text Embeddings

Text-to-image diffusion models are capable of generating high-quality images, but suboptimal pre-trained text representations often result in these images failing to align closely with the given text prompts. Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a popular and effective technique for improving text-image alignment in the generative process. However, CFG introduces significant computational overhead. In this paper, we present DIstilling CFG by sharpening text Embeddings (DICE) that replaces CFG in the sampling process with half the computational complexity while maintaining similar generation quality. DICE distills a CFG-based text-to-image diffusion model into a CFG-free version by refining text embeddings to replicate CFG-based directions. In this way, we avoid the computational drawbacks of CFG, enabling high-quality, well-aligned image generation at a fast sampling speed. Furthermore, examining the enhancement pattern, we identify the underlying mechanism of DICE that sharpens specific components of text embeddings to preserve semantic information while enhancing fine-grained details. Extensive experiments on multiple Stable Diffusion v1.5 variants, SDXL, and PixArt-αα demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/dice.
Feb 4, 2025

From Uncertain to Safe: Conformal Adaptation of Diffusion Models for Safe PDE Control

The application of deep learning for partial differential equation (PDE)-constrained control is gaining increasing attention. However, existing methods rarely consider safety requirements crucial in real-world applications. To address this limitation, we propose Safe Diffusion Models for PDE Control (SafeDiffCon), which introduce the uncertainty quantile as model uncertainty quantification to achieve optimal control under safety constraints through both post-training and inference phases. Firstly, our approach post-trains a pre-trained diffusion model to generate control sequences that better satisfy safety constraints while achieving improved control objectives via a reweighted diffusion loss, which incorporates the uncertainty quantile estimated using conformal prediction. Secondly, during inference, the diffusion model dynamically adjusts both its generation process and parameters through iterative guidance and fine-tuning, conditioned on control targets while simultaneously integrating the estimated uncertainty quantile. We evaluate SafeDiffCon on three control tasks: 1D Burgers' equation, 2D incompressible fluid, and controlled nuclear fusion problem. Results demonstrate that SafeDiffCon is the only method that satisfies all safety constraints, whereas other classical and deep learning baselines fail. Furthermore, while adhering to safety constraints, SafeDiffCon achieves the best control performance. The code can be found at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/safediffcon.
Dec 10, 2024

Rethinking Negative Prompting for Concept Suppression: Unconditional Anchoring and Localized Guidance

Text-to-image diffusion models have rapidly transitioned from research prototypes to widely deployed tools. Along with their impressive capabilities, these models can also generate harmful or undesirable content (e.g., NSFW imagery), motivating practical mechanisms for removing such concepts. Negative prompting, which uses the negative-prompt prediction as the guidance anchor, is among the most widely used mechanisms for steering sampling trajectories away from unwanted concepts. However, for jailbreak prompts, it can fail in a regime we refer to as guidance collapse, where the model's denoising predictions for the prompt and negative prompt become similar, so that the guidance difference driving negative prompting vanishes and the guided prediction degenerates to the negative-prompt prediction, undermining suppression. To fix this issue, we propose TraSCE (Trajectory Steering for ConcEpt Suppression), a training-free inference-time method that makes negative prompting reliable under guidance collapse. TraSCE combines two complementary components: (i) unconditional anchoring, which makes the fallback under guidance collapse a neutral unconditional prediction rather than the negative-prompt prediction, and (ii) an alignment-localized steering step, which deliberately induces this collapse for adversarial prompts and steers the sample to the unconditional fallback, while remaining minimally intrusive on benign prompts. We evaluate TraSCE on adversarial prompt benchmarks targeting nudity and violence, and further demonstrate its applicability to suppressing artistic styles and objects. Across these settings, TraSCE substantially improves the robustness of negative prompting to jailbreak prompts without any training, weight updates, or pre-collected concept-specific data (prompts or images), while keeping the impact on general image quality small.
Dec 3, 2024

Filterless Snapshot Hyperspectral Imaging using Guided Patch Diffusion

We consider the problem of reconstructing a HxWx31 hyperspectral image from a H×WH\times W grayscale snapshot measurement that is captured using only a single diffractive lens and a filterless panchromatic photosensor. This problem is severely ill-posed, but we present a model that produces high-quality results in simulation and experiment. We make efficient use of limited training data by creating a conditional denoising diffusion model that operates on small patches in a shift-invariant manner. During inference, we synchronize per-patch hyperspectral predictions using guidance by physical consistency with the system's optical point spread function. Our experiments reveal that the patch size can be as small as the point spread function, with local optical cues being the main source of information about complete spectra. Also, by drawing multiple samples, our model provides per-pixel uncertainty estimates that strongly correlate with reconstruction error.
Nov 26, 2024

ContrastiveCFG: Guiding Diffusion Sampling by Contrasting Positive and Negative Concepts

As Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) has proven effective in conditional diffusion model sampling for improved condition alignment, many applications use a negated CFG term as a Negative Prompting (NP) to filter out unwanted features from samples. However, simply negating CFG guidance creates an inverted probability distribution, often distorting samples away from the marginal distribution. Inspired by recent advances in conditional diffusion models for inverse problems, here we present a novel method to achieve guidance toward the given condition using contrastive loss. Specifically, our guidance term aligns or repels the denoising direction based on the given condition through contrastive loss, achieving a similar guiding effect to traditional CFG for positive conditions while overcoming the limitations of existing negative guidance methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively injects or removes the given concepts while maintaining sample quality across diverse scenarios, from simple class conditions to complex and overlapping text prompts.