Registers Matter for Pixel-Space Diffusion Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Starodubcev, Nikita, Sudakov, Ilia, Drobyshevskiy, Ilya, Babenko, Artem, Baranchuk, Dmitry
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866909047337254912
author Starodubcev, Nikita
Sudakov, Ilia
Drobyshevskiy, Ilya
Babenko, Artem
Baranchuk, Dmitry
author_facet Starodubcev, Nikita
Sudakov, Ilia
Drobyshevskiy, Ilya
Babenko, Artem
Baranchuk, Dmitry
contents Vision Transformers (ViTs) are known to exhibit high-norm patch-token outliers that degrade feature map quality, a problem effectively mitigated by \textit{register tokens}. As diffusion models increasingly adopt transformer architectures and move toward pixel-space training, they become closer in form to ViTs, raising the question of whether register tokens are also useful for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). In this work, we show that DiTs differ from ViTs in a key respect: they do not exhibit patch-token outliers. Interestingly, register tokens significantly improve convergence and generation quality of pixel-space DiTs. By analyzing intermediate representations, we find that register tokens produce cleaner feature maps at high noise levels, which may contribute to their effectiveness in pixel-space generation. We further observe that recent pixel-space DiT architectures implicitly incorporate register-like mechanisms, which may partially account for their strong empirical performance. Motivated by these insights, we investigate a parameter-efficient dual-stream architecture that specializes processing for register tokens and improves pixel-space generation quality with negligible runtime overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_16147
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Registers Matter for Pixel-Space Diffusion Transformers
Starodubcev, Nikita
Sudakov, Ilia
Drobyshevskiy, Ilya
Babenko, Artem
Baranchuk, Dmitry
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision Transformers (ViTs) are known to exhibit high-norm patch-token outliers that degrade feature map quality, a problem effectively mitigated by \textit{register tokens}. As diffusion models increasingly adopt transformer architectures and move toward pixel-space training, they become closer in form to ViTs, raising the question of whether register tokens are also useful for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). In this work, we show that DiTs differ from ViTs in a key respect: they do not exhibit patch-token outliers. Interestingly, register tokens significantly improve convergence and generation quality of pixel-space DiTs. By analyzing intermediate representations, we find that register tokens produce cleaner feature maps at high noise levels, which may contribute to their effectiveness in pixel-space generation. We further observe that recent pixel-space DiT architectures implicitly incorporate register-like mechanisms, which may partially account for their strong empirical performance. Motivated by these insights, we investigate a parameter-efficient dual-stream architecture that specializes processing for register tokens and improves pixel-space generation quality with negligible runtime overhead.
title Registers Matter for Pixel-Space Diffusion Transformers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16147