Coevolving Representations in Joint Image-Feature Diffusion

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kouzelis, Theodoros, Gidaris, Spyros, Komodakis, Nikos
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Kouzelis, Theodoros
Gidaris, Spyros
Komodakis, Nikos
author_facet Kouzelis, Theodoros
Gidaris, Spyros
Komodakis, Nikos
contents Joint image-feature generative modeling has recently emerged as an effective strategy for improving diffusion training by coupling low-level VAE latents with high-level semantic features extracted from pre-trained visual encoders. However, existing approaches rely on a fixed representation space, constructed independently of the generative objective and kept unchanged during training. We argue that the representation space guiding diffusion should itself adapt to the generative task. To this end, we propose Coevolving Representation Diffusion (CoReDi), a framework in which the semantic representation space evolves during training by learning a lightweight linear projection jointly with the diffusion model. While naively optimizing this projection leads to degenerate solutions, we show that stable coevolution can be achieved through a combination of stop-gradient targets, normalization, and targeted regularization that prevents feature collapse. This formulation enables the semantic space to progressively specialize to the needs of image synthesis, improving its complementarity with image latents. We apply CoReDi to both VAE latent diffusion and pixel-space diffusion, demonstrating that adaptive semantic representations improve generative modeling across both settings. Experiments show that CoReDi achieves faster convergence and higher sample quality compared to joint diffusion models operating in fixed representation spaces.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_17492
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Coevolving Representations in Joint Image-Feature Diffusion
Kouzelis, Theodoros
Gidaris, Spyros
Komodakis, Nikos
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Joint image-feature generative modeling has recently emerged as an effective strategy for improving diffusion training by coupling low-level VAE latents with high-level semantic features extracted from pre-trained visual encoders. However, existing approaches rely on a fixed representation space, constructed independently of the generative objective and kept unchanged during training. We argue that the representation space guiding diffusion should itself adapt to the generative task. To this end, we propose Coevolving Representation Diffusion (CoReDi), a framework in which the semantic representation space evolves during training by learning a lightweight linear projection jointly with the diffusion model. While naively optimizing this projection leads to degenerate solutions, we show that stable coevolution can be achieved through a combination of stop-gradient targets, normalization, and targeted regularization that prevents feature collapse. This formulation enables the semantic space to progressively specialize to the needs of image synthesis, improving its complementarity with image latents. We apply CoReDi to both VAE latent diffusion and pixel-space diffusion, demonstrating that adaptive semantic representations improve generative modeling across both settings. Experiments show that CoReDi achieves faster convergence and higher sample quality compared to joint diffusion models operating in fixed representation spaces.
title Coevolving Representations in Joint Image-Feature Diffusion
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17492