Aligning Generative Denoising with Discriminative Objectives Unleashes Diffusion for Visual Perception

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pang, Ziqi, Xu, Xin, Wang, Yu-Xiong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Pang, Ziqi
Xu, Xin
Wang, Yu-Xiong
author_facet Pang, Ziqi
Xu, Xin
Wang, Yu-Xiong
contents With the success of image generation, generative diffusion models are increasingly adopted for discriminative tasks, as pixel generation provides a unified perception interface. However, directly repurposing the generative denoising process for discriminative objectives reveals critical gaps rarely addressed previously. Generative models tolerate intermediate sampling errors if the final distribution remains plausible, but discriminative tasks require rigorous accuracy throughout, as evidenced in challenging multi-modal tasks like referring image segmentation. Motivated by this gap, we analyze and enhance alignment between generative diffusion processes and perception tasks, focusing on how perception quality evolves during denoising. We find: (1) earlier denoising steps contribute disproportionately to perception quality, prompting us to propose tailored learning objectives reflecting varying timestep contributions; (2) later denoising steps show unexpected perception degradation, highlighting sensitivity to training-denoising distribution shifts, addressed by our diffusion-tailored data augmentation; and (3) generative processes uniquely enable interactivity, serving as controllable user interfaces adaptable to correctional prompts in multi-round interactions. Our insights significantly improve diffusion-based perception models without architectural changes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on depth estimation, referring image segmentation, and generalist perception tasks. Code available at https://github.com/ziqipang/ADDP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_11457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Aligning Generative Denoising with Discriminative Objectives Unleashes Diffusion for Visual Perception
Pang, Ziqi
Xu, Xin
Wang, Yu-Xiong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
With the success of image generation, generative diffusion models are increasingly adopted for discriminative tasks, as pixel generation provides a unified perception interface. However, directly repurposing the generative denoising process for discriminative objectives reveals critical gaps rarely addressed previously. Generative models tolerate intermediate sampling errors if the final distribution remains plausible, but discriminative tasks require rigorous accuracy throughout, as evidenced in challenging multi-modal tasks like referring image segmentation. Motivated by this gap, we analyze and enhance alignment between generative diffusion processes and perception tasks, focusing on how perception quality evolves during denoising. We find: (1) earlier denoising steps contribute disproportionately to perception quality, prompting us to propose tailored learning objectives reflecting varying timestep contributions; (2) later denoising steps show unexpected perception degradation, highlighting sensitivity to training-denoising distribution shifts, addressed by our diffusion-tailored data augmentation; and (3) generative processes uniquely enable interactivity, serving as controllable user interfaces adaptable to correctional prompts in multi-round interactions. Our insights significantly improve diffusion-based perception models without architectural changes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on depth estimation, referring image segmentation, and generalist perception tasks. Code available at https://github.com/ziqipang/ADDP.
title Aligning Generative Denoising with Discriminative Objectives Unleashes Diffusion for Visual Perception
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11457