LayerSync: Self-aligning Intermediate Layers

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Haghighi, Yasaman, van Delft, Bastien, Hassan, Mariam, Alahi, Alexandre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Haghighi, Yasaman
van Delft, Bastien
Hassan, Mariam
Alahi, Alexandre
author_facet Haghighi, Yasaman
van Delft, Bastien
Hassan, Mariam
Alahi, Alexandre
contents We propose LayerSync, a domain-agnostic approach for improving the generation quality and the training efficiency of diffusion models. Prior studies have highlighted the connection between the quality of generation and the representations learned by diffusion models, showing that external guidance on model intermediate representations accelerates training. We reconceptualize this paradigm by regularizing diffusion models with their own intermediate representations. Building on the observation that representation quality varies across diffusion model layers, we show that the most semantically rich representations can act as an intrinsic guidance for weaker ones, reducing the need for external supervision. Our approach, LayerSync, is a self-sufficient, plug-and-play regularizer term with no overhead on diffusion model training and generalizes beyond the visual domain to other modalities. LayerSync requires no pretrained models nor additional data. We extensively evaluate the method on image generation and demonstrate its applicability to other domains such as audio, video, and motion generation. We show that it consistently improves the generation quality and the training efficiency. For example, we speed up the training of flow-based transformer by over 8.75x on ImageNet dataset and improved the generation quality by 23.6%. The code is available at https://github.com/vita-epfl/LayerSync.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_12581
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LayerSync: Self-aligning Intermediate Layers
Haghighi, Yasaman
van Delft, Bastien
Hassan, Mariam
Alahi, Alexandre
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
We propose LayerSync, a domain-agnostic approach for improving the generation quality and the training efficiency of diffusion models. Prior studies have highlighted the connection between the quality of generation and the representations learned by diffusion models, showing that external guidance on model intermediate representations accelerates training. We reconceptualize this paradigm by regularizing diffusion models with their own intermediate representations. Building on the observation that representation quality varies across diffusion model layers, we show that the most semantically rich representations can act as an intrinsic guidance for weaker ones, reducing the need for external supervision. Our approach, LayerSync, is a self-sufficient, plug-and-play regularizer term with no overhead on diffusion model training and generalizes beyond the visual domain to other modalities. LayerSync requires no pretrained models nor additional data. We extensively evaluate the method on image generation and demonstrate its applicability to other domains such as audio, video, and motion generation. We show that it consistently improves the generation quality and the training efficiency. For example, we speed up the training of flow-based transformer by over 8.75x on ImageNet dataset and improved the generation quality by 23.6%. The code is available at https://github.com/vita-epfl/LayerSync.
title LayerSync: Self-aligning Intermediate Layers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12581