Diffusion Transformer

Also known as DiT

Momentum

35 papers in the last four weeks, up 169% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 297

Apr 20, 2026cs.CV

UniCSG: Unified High-Fidelity Content-Constrained Style-Driven Generation via Staged Semantic and Frequency Disentanglement

Style transfer must match a target style while preserving content semantics. DiT-based diffusion models often suffer from content-style entanglement, leading to reference-content leakage and unstable generation. We present UniCSG, a unified framework for content-constrained, style-driven generation in both text-guided and reference-guided settings. UniCSG employs staged training: (i) a latent-space semantic disentanglement stage that combines low-frequency preprocessing with conditioning corruption to encourage content-style separation, and (ii) a latent-space frequency-aware detail reconstruction stage that refines details via multi-scale frequency supervision. We further incorporate pixel-space reward learning to align latent objectives with perceptual quality after decoding. Experiments demonstrate improved content faithfulness, style alignment, and robustness in both settings.
Apr 17, 2026cs.SD

Hierarchical Codec Diffusion for Video-to-Speech Generation

Video-to-Speech (VTS) generation aims to synthesize speech from a silent video without auditory signals. However, existing VTS methods disregard the hierarchical nature of speech, which spans coarse speaker-aware semantics to fine-grained prosodic details. This oversight hinders direct alignment between visual and speech features at specific hierarchical levels during property matching. In this paper, leveraging the hierarchical structure of Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ)-based codec, we propose HiCoDiT, a novel Hierarchical Codec Diffusion Transformer that exploits the inherent hierarchy of discrete speech tokens to achieve strong audio-visual alignment. Specifically, since lower-level tokens encode coarse speaker-aware semantics and higher-level tokens capture fine-grained prosody, HiCoDiT employs low-level and high-level blocks to generate tokens at different levels. The low-level blocks condition on lip-synchronized motion and facial identity to capture speaker-aware content, while the high-level blocks use facial expression to modulate prosodic dynamics. Finally, to enable more effective coarse-to-fine conditioning, we propose a dual-scale adaptive instance layer normalization that jointly captures global vocal style through channel-wise normalization and local prosody dynamics through temporal-wise normalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HiCoDiT outperforms baselines in fidelity and expressiveness, highlighting the potential of discrete modelling for VTS. The code and speech demo are both available at https://github.com/Jiaxin-Ye/HiCoDiT.
Apr 14, 2026cs.CV

Brain-DiT: A Universal Multi-state fMRI Foundation Model with Metadata-Conditioned Pretraining

Current fMRI foundation models primarily rely on a limited range of brain states and mismatched pretraining tasks, restricting their ability to learn generalized representations across diverse brain states. We present Brain-DiT, a universal multi-state fMRI foundation model pretrained on 349,898 sessions from 24 datasets spanning resting, task, naturalistic, disease, and sleep states. Unlike prior fMRI foundation models that rely on masked reconstruction in the raw-signal space or a latent space, Brain-DiT adopts metadata-conditioned diffusion pretraining with a Diffusion Transformer (DiT), enabling the model to learn multi-scale representations that capture both fine-grained functional structure and global semantics. Across extensive evaluations and ablations on 7 downstream tasks, we find consistent evidence that diffusion-based generative pretraining is a stronger proxy than reconstruction or alignment, with metadata-conditioned pretraining further improving downstream performance by disentangling intrinsic neural dynamics from population-level variability. We also observe that downstream tasks exhibit distinct preferences for representational scale: ADNI classification benefits more from global semantic representations, whereas age/sex prediction comparatively relies more on fine-grained local structure.
Apr 2, 2026cs.LG

Crystalite: A Lightweight Transformer for Efficient Crystal Modeling

Generative models for crystalline materials often rely on equivariant graph neural networks, which capture geometric structure well but are costly to train and slow to sample. We present Crystalite, a lightweight diffusion Transformer for crystal modeling built around two simple inductive biases. The first is Subatomic Tokenization, a compact chemically structured atom representation that replaces high-dimensional one-hot encodings and is better suited to continuous diffusion. The second is the Geometry Enhancement Module (GEM), which injects periodic minimum-image pair geometry directly into attention through additive geometric biases. Together, these components preserve the simplicity and efficiency of a standard Transformer while making it better matched to the structure of crystalline materials. Crystalite achieves state-of-the-art results on crystal structure prediction benchmarks, and de novo generation performance, attaining the best S.U.N. discovery score among the evaluated baselines while sampling substantially faster than geometry-heavy alternatives.
Mar 23, 2026cs.CV

SHARP: Spectrum-aware Highly-dynamic Adaptation for Resolution Promotion in Remote Sensing Synthesis

Text-to-image generation powered by Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) has made remarkable strides, yet remote sensing (RS) synthesis lags behind due to two barriers: the absence of a domain-specialized DiT prior and the prohibitive cost of training at the large resolutions that RS applications demand. Training-free resolution promotion via Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) rescaling offers a practical remedy, but every existing method applies a static positional scaling rule throughout the denoising process. This uniform compression is particularly harmful for RS imagery, whose substantially denser medium- and high-frequency energy encodes the fine structures critical for aerial-scene realism, such as vehicles, building contours, and road markings. Addressing both challenges requires a domain-specialized generative prior coupled with a denoising-aware positional adaptation strategy. To this end, we fine-tune FLUX on over 100,000 curated RS images to build a strong domain prior (RS-FLUX), and propose Spectrum-aware Highly-dynamic Adaptation for Resolution Promotion (SHARP), a training-free method that introduces a rational fractional time schedule k_rs(t) into RoPE. SHARP applies strong positional promotion during the early layout-formation stage and progressively relaxes it during detail recovery, aligning extrapolation strength with the frequency-progressive nature of diffusion denoising. Its resolution-agnostic formulation further enables robust multi-scale generation from a single set of hyperparameters. Extensive experiments across six square and rectangular resolutions show that SHARP consistently outperforms all training-free baselines on CLIP Score, Aesthetic Score, and HPSv2, with widening margins at more aggressive extrapolation factors and negligible computational overhead. Code and weights are available at https://github.com/bxuanz/SHARP.
Mar 16, 2026cs.CV

WiT: Waypoint Diffusion Transformers for Alleviating Trajectory Conflict in Pixel-Space Image Generation

While recent Flow Matching models avoid the reconstruction bottlenecks of latent autoencoders by operating directly in pixel space, the raw pixel manifold provides little explicit semantic organization, making target-specific transport directions difficult for a shared finite-capacity vector field to distinguish. When different transport requirements are locally entangled in this way, their learning signals can interfere and hinder optimization, a phenomenon we refer to as trajectory conflict. To alleviate trajectory conflict while preserving direct generation in pixel space, we propose Waypoint Diffusion Transformers (WiT), which introduces explicit semantic routing into pixel-space generation. WiT structures pixel-space prediction through compact semantic waypoints projected from pre-trained vision representations, providing a semantically organized intermediate representation that complements direct pixel prediction. During ODE integration, a lightweight Waypoints Predictor dynamically infers the semantic waypoint from the current noisy state, and the predicted waypoint continuously conditions the primary Pixel Space Generator through our Just-Pixel AdaLN mechanism. This spatially varying semantic modulation reorganizes the finite-capacity learning problem and helps the model preserve target-specific transport directions while retaining generation entirely in pixel space. Experiments on ImageNet 2012 demonstrate consistent improvements over strong pixel-space baselines across model scales, with WiT-H/16 achieving an FID of 1.79. Code will be released at https://hainuo-wang.github.io/WiT.
Mar 14, 2026cs.LG

PDE-SSM: A Spectral State Space Approach to Spatial Mixing in Diffusion Transformers

The success of vision transformers-especially for generative modeling-is limited by the quadratic cost and weak spatial inductive bias of self-attention. We propose PDE-SSM, a spatial state-space block that replaces attention with a learnable convection-diffusion-reaction partial differential equation. This operator encodes a strong spatial prior by modeling information flow via physically grounded dynamics rather than all-to-all token interactions. Solving the PDE in the Fourier domain yields global coupling with near-linear complexity of O(Nlog⁡N)O(N \log N), delivering a principled and scalable alternative to attention. We integrate PDE-SSM into a flow-matching generative model to obtain the PDE-based Diffusion Transformer PDE-SSM-DiT. Empirically, PDE-SSM-DiT matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art Diffusion Transformers while substantially reducing compute. Our results show that, analogous to 1D settings where SSMs supplant attention, multi-dimensional PDE operators provide an efficient, inductive-bias-rich foundation for next-generation vision models.
Mar 13, 2026cs.CV

AccelAes: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers for Training-Free Aesthetic-Enhanced Image Generation

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) are a dominant backbone for high-fidelity text-to-image generation due to strong scalability and alignment at high resolutions. However, quadratic self-attention over dense spatial tokens leads to high inference latency and limits deployment. We observe that denoising is spatially non-uniform with respect to aesthetic descriptors in the prompt. Regions associated with aesthetic tokens receive concentrated cross-attention and show larger temporal variation, while low-affinity regions evolve smoothly with redundant computation. Based on this insight, we propose AccelAes, a training-free framework that accelerates DiTs through aesthetics-aware spatio-temporal reduction while improving perceptual aesthetics. AccelAes builds AesMask, a one-shot aesthetic focus mask derived from prompt semantics and cross-attention signals. When localized computation is feasible, SkipSparse reallocates computation and guidance to masked regions. We further reduce temporal redundancy using a lightweight step-level prediction cache that periodically replaces full Transformer evaluations. Experiments on representative DiT families show consistent acceleration and improved aesthetics-oriented quality. On Lumina-Next, AccelAes achieves a 2.11×\times speedup and improves ImageReward by +11.9% over the dense baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/xuanhuayin/AccelAes.
Mar 10, 2026cs.CV

RAE-NWM: Navigation World Model in Dense Visual Representation Space

Visual navigation requires agents to reach goals in complex environments through perception and planning. World models address this task by simulating action-conditioned state transitions to predict future observations. Current navigation world models typically learn state evolution under actions within the compressed latent space of a Variational Autoencoder, where spatial compression often discards fine-grained structural information and hinders precise control. To better understand the propagation characteristics of different representations, we conduct a linear dynamics probe and observe that dense DINOv2 features exhibit stronger linear predictability for action-conditioned transitions. Motivated by this observation, we propose the Representation Autoencoder-based Navigation World Model (RAE-NWM), which models navigation dynamics in a dense visual representation space. We employ a Conditional Diffusion Transformer with Decoupled Diffusion Transformer head (CDiT-DH) to model continuous transitions, and introduce a separate time-driven gating module for dynamics conditioning to regulate action injection strength during generation. Extensive evaluations show that modeling sequential rollouts in this space improves structural stability and action accuracy, benefiting downstream planning and navigation.
Mar 6, 2026cs.CV

Spectral and Trajectory Regularization for Diffusion Transformer Super-Resolution

Diffusion transformer (DiT) architectures show great potential for real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR). However, their computationally expensive iterative sampling necessitates one-step distillation. Existing one-step distillation methods struggle with Real-ISR on DiT. They suffer from fundamental trajectory mismatch and generate severe grid-like periodic artifacts. To tackle these challenges, we propose StrSR, a novel one-step adversarial distillation framework featuring spectral and trajectory regularization. Specifically, we propose an asymmetric discriminative distillation architecture to bridge the trajectory gap. Additionally, we design a frequency distribution matching strategy to effectively suppress DiT-specific periodic artifacts caused by high-frequency spectral leakage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StrSR achieves state-of-the-art performance in Real-ISR, across both quantitative metrics and visual perception. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/jkwang28/StrSR .
Mar 2, 2026cs.CV

TerraDiT: Point-Conditioned Diffusion Transformer for Satellite Image Synthesis

We introduce TerraDiT, a diffusion transformer designed for text-to-satellite image generation with point-based control. Existing controlled satellite image generative models often require pixel-level maps that are time-consuming to acquire, yet semantically limited. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel point-based conditioning framework that controls the generation process through the spatial location of the points and the textual description associated with each point, providing semantically rich control signals. This approach enables flexible, annotation-friendly, and computationally simple inference for satellite image generation. To this end, we introduce an adaptive local attention mechanism that effectively regularizes the attention scores based on the input point queries. We systematically evaluate various domain-specific design choices for training TerraDiT, including the selection of satellite image representation for alignment and geolocation representation for conditioning. Our experiments demonstrate that TerraDiT achieves impressive generation performance, surpassing the state-of-the-art remote sensing generative models. Our models, dataset, and code are available at https://github.com/mvrl/TerraDiT.
Feb 10, 2026cs.LG

Learning on the Manifold: Unlocking Standard Diffusion Transformers with Representation Encoders

Leveraging representation encoders for generative modeling offers a path for efficient, high-fidelity synthesis. However, standard diffusion transformers fail to converge on these representations directly. While recent work attributes this to a capacity bottleneck proposing computationally expensive width scaling of diffusion transformers we demonstrate that the failure is fundamentally geometric. We identify Geometric Interference as the root cause: standard Euclidean flow matching forces probability paths through the low-density interior of the hyperspherical feature space of representation encoders, rather than following the manifold surface. To resolve this, we propose Riemannian Flow Matching with Jacobi Regularization (RJF). By constraining the generative process to the manifold geodesics and correcting for curvature-induced error propagation, RJF enables standard Diffusion Transformer architectures to converge without width scaling. Our method RJF enables the standard DiT-B architecture (131M parameters) to converge effectively, achieving an FID of 3.37 where prior methods fail to converge. Code: https://github.com/amandpkr/RJF
Feb 6, 2026cs.LG

DiTS: Multimodal Diffusion Transformers Are Time Series Forecasters

While generative modeling facilitates probabilistic time series forecasting, incorporating heterogeneous exogenous information remains challenging. Diffusion Transformers (DiT) provide a scalable framework for conditional generation, yet their adaptation to forecasting calls for conditioning mechanisms tailored to time series. Endogenous targets and exogenous covariates differ in sources, semantics, and statistical characteristics, while sharing temporal coordinates that support fine-grained conditional guidance. Covariates can describe future variability and temporal dependence beyond the conditional mean targeted by direct regression. Motivated by these considerations, we propose Diffusion Transformers for Time Series (DiTS), a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for covariate-aware forecasting. DiTS models endogenous targets and exogenous covariates as distinct modalities, jointly conditioning future generation on target history and available covariates. Flow matching makes covariate-dependent distributional information relevant to velocity prediction conditioned on noisy future states. We introduce Time-aligned Modulation, extending AdaLN with the temporal-alignment prior to generate patch-wise modulation parameters from aligned covariates and diffusion time. Across diverse covariate-aware forecasting tasks, DiTS achieves strong performance in both deterministic and probabilistic forecasting, demonstrating the effectiveness of conditional generation for both point and distributional forecasting.
Feb 5, 2026cs.LG

Shiva-DiT: Residual-Based Differentiable Top-kk Selection for Efficient Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) are costly at high resolution because self-attention scales quadratically with token sequence length. Existing pruning methods do not jointly provide end-to-end learnability, low training overhead, and deterministic token counts for predictable token-dependent computation. We propose Shiva-DiT, based on Residual-Based Differentiable Top-k Selection. Its forward pass executes hard top-k selection, while a residual-aware straight-through estimator propagates gradients to both token scores and the budget k without evaluating a second backbone path. A Context-Aware Router and Adaptive Ratio Policy learn layer- and timestep-dependent retention schedules under a target average budget. Experiments on SD3-Medium, Flux.1-dev, and PixArt-Σ show consistent reductions in FLOPs and measured latency. On SD3-Medium, Shiva-DiT provides four fidelity-latency operating points and reaches a 1.54x wall-clock speedup with competitive fidelity.
Jan 14, 2026cs.CV

Mixture of Distributions Matters: Dynamic Sparse Attention for Efficient Video Diffusion Transformers

While Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved notable progress in video generation, this long-sequence generation task remains constrained by the quadratic complexity inherent to self-attention mechanisms, creating significant barriers to practical deployment. Although sparse attention methods attempt to address this challenge, existing approaches either rely on oversimplified static patterns or require computationally expensive sampling operations to achieve dynamic sparsity, resulting in inaccurate pattern predictions and degraded generation quality. To overcome these limitations, we propose a \underline{\textbf{M}}ixture-\underline{\textbf{O}}f-\underline{\textbf{D}}istribution \textbf{DiT} (\textbf{MOD-DiT}), a novel sampling-free dynamic attention framework that accurately models evolving attention patterns through a two-stage process. First, MOD-DiT leverages prior information from early denoising steps and adopts a {distributed mixing approach} to model an efficient linear approximation model, which is then used to predict mask patterns for a specific denoising interval. Second, an online block masking strategy dynamically applies these predicted masks while maintaining historical sparsity information, eliminating the need for repetitive sampling operations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate consistent acceleration and quality improvements across multiple benchmarks and model architectures, validating MOD-DiT's effectiveness for efficient, high-quality video generation while overcoming the computational limitations of traditional sparse attention approaches.
Jan 13, 2026cs.CV

SnapGen++: Unleashing Diffusion Transformers for Efficient High-Fidelity Image Generation on Edge Devices

Recent advances in diffusion transformers (DiTs) have set new standards in image generation, yet remain impractical for on-device deployment due to their high computational and memory costs. In this work, we present an efficient DiT framework tailored for mobile and edge devices that achieves transformer-level generation quality under strict resource constraints. Our design combines three key components. First, we propose a compact DiT architecture with an adaptive global-local sparse attention mechanism that balances global context modeling and local detail preservation. Second, we propose an elastic training framework that jointly optimizes sub-DiTs of varying capacities within a unified supernetwork, allowing a single model to dynamically adjust for efficient inference across different hardware. Finally, we develop Knowledge-Guided Distribution Matching Distillation, a step-distillation pipeline that integrates the DMD objective with knowledge transfer from few-step teacher models, producing high-fidelity and low-latency generation (e.g., 4-step) suitable for real-time on-device use. Together, these contributions enable scalable, efficient, and high-quality diffusion models for deployment on diverse hardware.
Jan 5, 2026cs.CV

TexTailor: Inference-Time Textual Guidance Tailoring for Multimodal Diffusion Transformers

Recent breakthroughs of transformer-based diffusion models, particularly with Multimodal Diffusion Transformers (MMDiT) driven models like FLUX and Qwen Image, have facilitated thrilling experiences in visual generation. However, these models rely only on the interactions between textual conditions and visual features to produce semantically aligned images. Once the interactions fail to reflect the nuanced compositional structure of the prompt, the generated images might be unsatisfactory. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of how different blocks and their interactions with textual conditions is crucial for better understanding the intrinsic attributes and for enhancing their interactions accordingly to strengthen the prompts adherence. In this paper, we first develop a systematic pipeline to comprehensively investigate each block's functionality by \textit{removing}, \textit{disabling}, and \textit{enhancing} textual hidden-states at corresponding blocks. Our analysis reveals that 1) semantic information appears in earlier blocks and finer details are rendered in later blocks, 2) removing specific blocks is usually less disruptive than disabling text conditions, and 3) enhancing textual conditions in selective blocks improves semantic attributes. Building on these observations, we propose \method, a novel inference-time method for tailoring block-wise textual guidance. Our approach not only improves text-image alignment but also enables a range of downstream applications, including precise editing and inference acceleration. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our method outperforms various baselines and remains flexible across text-to-image generation, image editing, and inference acceleration. Our method improves T2I-Combench from 56.92% to 63.00% and GenEval from 66.42% to 71.63% on SD3.5, without sacrificing synthesis quality.
Dec 23, 2025cs.CV

Probing and Leveraging Video Diffusion Transformer Features for Robust Point Tracking

Despite achieving strong results on standard benchmarks, current point tracking methods rely on feature backbones that are rarely designed with the temporal coherence needed for robust real-world performance. While recent works incorporate powerful visual foundation model (VFM) features into tracking pipelines, no prior work has systematically analyzed which VFM provides the most robust representations for point tracking. We present the first such analysis, evaluating diverse VFMs in a zero-shot setting on both standard and robustness benchmarks for point tracking. Our study reveals that video diffusion transformers (DiTs) consistently yield the most temporally coherent and discriminative features, even surpassing ResNet backbones explicitly supervised on tracking data. We hypothesize this advantage stem from large-scale video pretraining, full 3D spatio-temporal attention, and a diffusion training objective. Motivated by this finding, we propose DiTracker, which integrates video DiT features into existing tracking frameworks through query-key matching cost computation, cost-level fusion with a lightweight ResNet branch, and LoRA adaptation. Under the same tracking head, DiTracker is trained solely on synthetic data with far fewer iterations, yet outperforms CoTracker3 trained with additional real-world videos, with the largest gains under challenging and corrupted scenarios. It further generalizes across tracking heads and scales with backbone size, confirming that generative video pretraining provides real-world priors that reduce the dependence on large-scale real-data supervision.
Dec 19, 2025cs.CV

EMAG: Self-Rectifying Diffusion Sampling with Exponential Moving Average Guidance

In diffusion and flow-matching generative models, guidance techniques are widely used to improve sample quality and consistency. Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is the de facto choice in modern systems and achieves this by contrasting conditional and unconditional samples. Recent work explores contrasting negative samples at inference using a weaker model, via strong/weak model pairs, attention-based masking, stochastic block dropping, or perturbations to the self-attention energy landscape. While these strategies refine the generation quality, they still lack a reliable control over the granularity or difficulty of the negative samples, and target-layer selection is often fixed. We propose Exponential Moving Average Guidance (EMAG), a training-free mechanism that modifies attention at inference time in diffusion transformers, with a statistics-based, adaptive layer-selection rule. Unlike prior methods, EMAG produces harder, semantically faithful negatives (fine-grained degradations), surfacing difficult failure modes, enabling the denoiser to refine subtle artifacts, boosting the quality and human preference score (HPS) by +0.54 over CFG. We further demonstrate that EMAG naturally composes with advanced orthogonal guidance techniques, such as APG and CADS, further improving HPS.
Dec 8, 2025cs.CV

ContextAnyone: Context-Aware Diffusion for Character-Consistent Text-to-Video Generation

Text-to-video generation has advanced rapidly, yet preserving a character's holistic appearance from a single reference image remains challenging, particularly when the character undergoes large pose, motion, and scene changes. Existing reference-conditioned approaches primarily treat the reference image as a conditioning signal, which can weaken fine-grained appearance information as reference and noisy video tokens interact during denoising. We propose \textbf{ContextAnyone}, a context-aware diffusion framework that instead treats the reference as an explicitly preserved appearance anchor. Our key idea is to jointly reconstruct the reference image and generate the target video within a shared diffusion transformer, providing direct supervision for preserving identity and fine-grained appearance throughout denoising. To maintain the reference as a stable source of appearance information, we further introduce asymmetric information flow that allows video tokens to selectively access reference tokens while preventing noisy video features from propagating back to the reference branch. We complement this design with Gap-RoPE, which separates the positional representations of the reference and generated video tokens. Experiments on a benchmark constructed from OpenVid-HD demonstrate that ContextAnyone improves both identity and fine-grained appearance consistency over existing reference-conditioned baselines while maintaining motion characteristics close to the underlying text-to-video generator.
Nov 27, 2025cs.CV

Z-Image: An Efficient Image Generation Foundation Model with Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer

The landscape of high-performance image generation models is currently dominated by proprietary systems, such as Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 4.0. Leading open-source alternatives, including Qwen-Image, Hunyuan-Image-3.0 and FLUX.2, are characterized by massive parameter counts (20B to 80B), making them impractical for inference, and fine-tuning on consumer-grade hardware. To address this gap, we propose Z-Image, an efficient 6B-parameter foundation generative model built upon a Scalable Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer (S3-DiT) architecture that challenges the "scale-at-all-costs" paradigm. By systematically optimizing the entire model lifecycle -- from a curated data infrastructure to a streamlined training curriculum -- we complete the full training workflow in just 314K H800 GPU hours (approx. $630K). Our few-step distillation scheme with reward post-training further yields Z-Image-Turbo, offering both sub-second inference latency on an enterprise-grade H800 GPU and compatibility with consumer-grade hardware (<16GB VRAM). Additionally, our omni-pre-training paradigm also enables efficient training of Z-Image-Edit, an editing model with impressive instruction-following capabilities. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our model achieves performance comparable to or surpassing that of leading competitors across various dimensions. Most notably, Z-Image exhibits exceptional capabilities in photorealistic image generation and bilingual text rendering, delivering results that rival top-tier commercial models, thereby demonstrating that state-of-the-art results are achievable with significantly reduced computational overhead. We publicly release our code, weights, and online demo to foster the development of accessible, budget-friendly, yet state-of-the-art generative models.
Nov 24, 2025cs.CV

Phase-Aligned RoPE for Mixed-Resolution Diffusion Transformer

Rotary positional embeddings (RoPE) are widely used in diffusion transformers (DiTs) to encode spatial relationships, yet their behavior with mixed-resolution tokens remains underexplored. A natural approach is to rescale token positions from different resolutions into a unified coordinate system before attention, but we show this fails. Our analysis shows that with RoPE, the attention similarity score is a highly structured and periodic function of token distance, so rescaling distances across resolutions moves token pairs to different regions of this periodic function, leading to incorrect attention scores. Motivated by this, we introduce Phase-Aligned Mixed-Resolution Attention (PMA), a training-free mechanism that stabilizes mixed-resolution attention. PMA modifies the RoPE position mapping to enforce a consistent positional scale for every query-key pair, ensuring that relative distances are evaluated under a single reference scale. To further improve local coherence near resolution transitions, we incorporate a lightweight boundary refinement module that softly exchanges features across adjacent scales. Experiments on image and video diffusion models validate our analysis and demonstrate consistent improvements in visual fidelity and computational efficiency.
Sep 26, 2025cs.CV

RefAM: Attention Magnets for Zero-Shot Referral Segmentation

Most existing approaches to referring segmentation achieve strong performance only through fine-tuning or by composing multiple pre-trained models, often at the cost of additional training and architectural modifications. Meanwhile, large-scale generative diffusion models encode rich semantic information, making them attractive as general-purpose feature extractors. In this work, we introduce a new method that directly exploits features (attention scores) from diffusion transformers for downstream tasks, requiring neither architectural modifications nor additional training. To systematically evaluate these features, we extend benchmarks with vision-language grounding tasks spanning both images and videos. Our key insight is that stop words act as attention magnets: they accumulate surplus attention and can be filtered to reduce noise. Moreover, we identify global attention sinks (GAS) emerging in deeper layers and show that they can be safely suppressed or redirected onto auxiliary tokens, leading to sharper and more accurate grounding maps. We further propose an attention redistribution strategy, where appended stop words partition background activations into smaller clusters, yielding sharper and more localized heatmaps. Building on these findings, we develop RefAM, a simple training-free grounding framework that combines cross-attention maps, GAS handling, and redistribution. Across zero-shot referring image and video segmentation benchmarks, our approach achieves strong performance and surpasses prior methods on most datasets, establishing a new state of the art among training-free methods, without task-specific training or architectural modification. For video, we localize the referent from the spatio-temporal features of a video diffusion transformer via a first-frame query that is then propagated; we therefore do not explicitly resolve temporal (which-frame) expressions.
Aug 20, 2025cs.CV

Vivid-VR: Distilling Concepts from Text-to-Video Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Video Restoration

We present Vivid-VR, a DiT-based generative video restoration method built upon an advanced T2V foundation model, where ControlNet is leveraged to control the generation process, ensuring content consistency. However, conventional fine-tuning of such controllable pipelines frequently suffers from distribution drift due to limitations in imperfect multimodal alignment, resulting in compromised texture realism and temporal coherence. To tackle this challenge, we propose a concept distillation training strategy that utilizes the pretrained T2V model to synthesize training samples with embedded textual concepts, thereby distilling its conceptual understanding to preserve texture and temporal quality. To enhance generation controllability, we redesign the control architecture with two key components: 1) a control feature projector that filters degradation artifacts from input video latents to minimize their propagation through the generation pipeline, and 2) a new ControlNet connector employing a dual-branch design. This connector synergistically combines MLP-based feature mapping with cross-attention mechanism for dynamic control feature retrieval, enabling both content preservation and adaptive control signal modulation. Extensive experiments show that Vivid-VR performs favorably against existing approaches on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks, as well as AIGC videos, achieving impressive texture realism, visual vividness, and temporal consistency. The codes and checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/csbhr/Vivid-VR.
Jul 17, 2025cs.CV

NABLA: Neighborhood Adaptive Block-Level Attention

Recent progress in transformer-based architectures has demonstrated remarkable success in video generation tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of full attention mechanisms remains a critical bottleneck, particularly for high-resolution and long-duration video sequences. In this paper, we propose NABLA, a novel Neighborhood Adaptive Block-Level Attention mechanism that dynamically adapts to sparsity patterns in video diffusion transformers (DiTs). By leveraging block-wise attention with adaptive sparsity-driven threshold, NABLA reduces computational overhead while preserving generative quality. Our method does not require custom low-level operator design and can be seamlessly integrated with PyTorch's Flex Attention operator. Experiments demonstrate that NABLA achieves up to 2.7x faster training and inference compared to baseline almost without compromising quantitative metrics (CLIP score, VBench score, human evaluation score) and visual quality drop. The code and model weights are available here: https://github.com/gen-ai-team/Wan2.1-NABLA
May 16, 2025cs.CV

Conditioning Residuals for Diffusion Models via Representation Feedback

Diffusion models now serve as a common foundation for multimedia generation, and useful intermediate representations emerge during their generative training. Standard architectures, however, propagate these representations through the main feature stream, without explicitly reintroducing their encoded semantics to later denoising layers. Meanwhile, such backbones already provide a conditioning pathway for global modulation by predefined inputs. This work examines whether this native pathway can also route internally inferred semantics as evolving, sample-dependent cues. We propose Conditioning Residuals, a lightweight feedback mechanism that converts aggregated features into residuals added to condition embeddings. By feeding back compact feature summaries, it provides adaptive generative guidance and encourages a tighter semantic bottleneck, without external encoders, auxiliary objectives, or sampling-time changes. It supports feedback at one or multiple depths in UNet and DiT backbones, with negligible overhead. Across diffusion formulations, backbone configurations, and datasets, experiments show consistent gains in generative performance, along with stronger representations in downstream linear probing and segmentation. Mechanistic analyses reveal improved generative training dynamics and reshaped feature structure, suggesting a grounded, generalizable way to enhance diffusion backbones from within.
Date pendingcs.CV

UniLayDiff: A Unified Diffusion Transformer for Content-Aware Layout Generation

Content-aware layout generation is a critical task in graphic design automation, focused on creating visually appealing arrangements of elements that seamlessly blend with a given background image. The variety of real-world applications makes it highly challenging to develop a single model capable of unifying the diverse range of input-constrained generation sub-tasks, such as those conditioned by element types, sizes, or their relationships. Current methods either address only a subset of these tasks or necessitate separate model parameters for different conditions, failing to offer a truly unified solution. In this paper, we propose UniLayDiff: a Unified Diffusion Transformer, that for the first time, addresses various content-aware layout generation tasks with a single, end-to-end trainable model. Specifically, we treat layout constraints as a distinct modality and employ Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer framework to capture the complex interplay between the background image, layout elements, and diverse constraints. Moreover, we integrate relation constraints through fine-tuning the model with LoRA after pretraining the model on other tasks. Such a schema not only achieves unified conditional generation but also enhances overall layout quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniLayDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance across from unconditional to various conditional generation tasks and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first model to unify the full range of content-aware layout generation tasks.