Temporal Concept Dynamics in Diffusion Models via Prompt-Conditioned Interventions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Gorgun, Ada, Sammani, Fawaz, Deligiannis, Nikos, Schiele, Bernt, Fischer, Jonas
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Gorgun, Ada
Sammani, Fawaz
Deligiannis, Nikos
Schiele, Bernt
Fischer, Jonas
author_facet Gorgun, Ada
Sammani, Fawaz
Deligiannis, Nikos
Schiele, Bernt
Fischer, Jonas
contents Diffusion models are usually evaluated by their final outputs, gradually denoising random noise into meaningful images. Yet, generation unfolds along a trajectory, and analyzing this dynamic process is crucial for understanding how controllable, reliable, and predictable these models are in terms of their success/failure modes. In this work, we ask the question: when does noise turn into a specific concept (e.g., age) and lock in the denoising trajectory? We propose PCI (Prompt-Conditioned Intervention) to study this question. PCI is a training-free and model-agnostic framework for analyzing concept dynamics through diffusion time. The central idea is the analysis of Concept Insertion Success (CIS), defined as the probability that a concept inserted at a given timestep is preserved and reflected in the final image, offering a way to characterize the temporal dynamics of concept formation. Applied to several state-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion models and a broad taxonomy of concepts, PCI reveals diverse temporal behaviors across diffusion models, in which certain phases of the trajectory are more favorable to specific concepts even within the same concept type. These findings also provide actionable insights for text-driven image editing, highlighting when interventions are most effective without requiring access to model internals or training, and yielding quantitatively stronger edits that achieve a balance of semantic accuracy and content preservation than strong baselines. Code is available at: https://adagorgun.github.io/PCI-Project/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_08486
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporal Concept Dynamics in Diffusion Models via Prompt-Conditioned Interventions
Gorgun, Ada
Sammani, Fawaz
Deligiannis, Nikos
Schiele, Bernt
Fischer, Jonas
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Diffusion models are usually evaluated by their final outputs, gradually denoising random noise into meaningful images. Yet, generation unfolds along a trajectory, and analyzing this dynamic process is crucial for understanding how controllable, reliable, and predictable these models are in terms of their success/failure modes. In this work, we ask the question: when does noise turn into a specific concept (e.g., age) and lock in the denoising trajectory? We propose PCI (Prompt-Conditioned Intervention) to study this question. PCI is a training-free and model-agnostic framework for analyzing concept dynamics through diffusion time. The central idea is the analysis of Concept Insertion Success (CIS), defined as the probability that a concept inserted at a given timestep is preserved and reflected in the final image, offering a way to characterize the temporal dynamics of concept formation. Applied to several state-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion models and a broad taxonomy of concepts, PCI reveals diverse temporal behaviors across diffusion models, in which certain phases of the trajectory are more favorable to specific concepts even within the same concept type. These findings also provide actionable insights for text-driven image editing, highlighting when interventions are most effective without requiring access to model internals or training, and yielding quantitatively stronger edits that achieve a balance of semantic accuracy and content preservation than strong baselines. Code is available at: https://adagorgun.github.io/PCI-Project/
title Temporal Concept Dynamics in Diffusion Models via Prompt-Conditioned Interventions
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08486