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Hugging Face Trending Papers

Equal Path Cost, Unequal Output Effects: Understanding Perturbation Propagation in Diffusion Models

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The paper investigates how perturbations introduced during the sampling process of diffusion models influence the final generated output. It introduces a theoretical framework that quantifies perturbation strength via the Kullback–Leibler divergence, called path cost, and shows that this metric bounds but does not fully determine output changes. Using this framework, the authors derive a response identity linking local perturbations to feature mean changes, and validate their theory through experiments on pretrained diffusion models and cache‑based acceleration techniques.

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