arXiv Machine Learning By Junha Park, Jaemyung Yu, Jaehui Hwang, Jong-Seok Lee, Dongyoon Han

No Channels Left Behind: Understanding Diffusion Acceleration through Residual Gates

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The paper investigates how diffusion transformer acceleration methods such as REPA and dispersive regularization affect the AdaLN‑Zero residual gate α, which controls conditioned updates in the residual stream. It finds that these methods reorganize α, making accelerated models more sensitive to its perturbations and aligning gate geometry with semantic class relationships. Introducing a normalized participation ratio (nPR) to measure gate channel organization, the authors show that broader gate participation correlates with higher generation quality and propose a teacher‑free radial objective that encourages this broader participation, improving FID on ImageNet.

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arXiv Computer Vision
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Policy‑Mask is a budget‑aware policy that jointly selects a timestep, a diffusion block, and a subset of channels from a frozen diffusion model to optimize downstream discriminative tasks. By normalizing channel scores and training on the downstream objective, it outperforms fixed‑extraction baselines on segmentation, classification, and semantic correspondence, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on ADE20K, CIFAR‑100, and SPair‑71k. The method also extends to diffusion transformers by mapping U‑Net channels to image‑token hidden dimensions.

By Ivan Listopadov, Maksim Nakhodnov, Aibek Alanov
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On-Policy Self-Distillation in Diffusion Models

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By Wei Zhou, Xiongwei Zhu, Lingdong Kong, Bo Chen, Lei Zhang, Yongyuan Liang, Xiaoxia Hou, Ye Tian, Xian Sun, Yingshuo Wang, Linfeng Li, Shengqiong Wu, Leigang Qu, Feng Li, Wei Liu, Julian McAuley, Tat-Seng Chua