On the Limits of Latent Reuse in Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Yu, Yifeng, Yu, Lu
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Yu, Yifeng
Yu, Lu
author_facet Yu, Yifeng
Yu, Lu
contents Diffusion models are often trained in low-dimensional latent spaces, which are then reused for related but shifted datasets. In this work, we study when such latent reuse remains reliable under distribution shift. We consider a source-target setting in which both datasets are approximately low-dimensional but may lie near different subspaces. We show that freezing and reusing a source latent space induces a target-domain score error governed by two quantities: the principal-angle misalignment between the source and target subspaces, and the target ambient noise amplified by the diffusion time scale. Motivated by these limits, we further study mixed source-target training and characterize how the required shared latent dimension depends on the relative geometry of the two distributions. Our results provide theoretical guidance on when latent reuse is reliable and when learning a shared representation may be necessary.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13448
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Limits of Latent Reuse in Diffusion Models
Yu, Yifeng
Yu, Lu
Machine Learning
Probability
Diffusion models are often trained in low-dimensional latent spaces, which are then reused for related but shifted datasets. In this work, we study when such latent reuse remains reliable under distribution shift. We consider a source-target setting in which both datasets are approximately low-dimensional but may lie near different subspaces. We show that freezing and reusing a source latent space induces a target-domain score error governed by two quantities: the principal-angle misalignment between the source and target subspaces, and the target ambient noise amplified by the diffusion time scale. Motivated by these limits, we further study mixed source-target training and characterize how the required shared latent dimension depends on the relative geometry of the two distributions. Our results provide theoretical guidance on when latent reuse is reliable and when learning a shared representation may be necessary.
title On the Limits of Latent Reuse in Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13448