Spectral Guidance for Flexible and Efficient Control of Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Moreira, Gabriel, Marques, Manuel, Costeira, João Paulo, Xiong, Chenyan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866910267269447680
author Moreira, Gabriel
Marques, Manuel
Costeira, João Paulo
Xiong, Chenyan
author_facet Moreira, Gabriel
Marques, Manuel
Costeira, João Paulo
Xiong, Chenyan
contents We introduce Spectral Guidance, a framework for controlling diffusion models by leveraging the intrinsic geometry of the generative process. As data is progressively corrupted by noise, only a small number of features remain informative for control. We characterize them as the singular functions of a conditional expectation operator and show that they can be learned via a self-supervised objective. Once recovered, this basis enables the projection of arbitrary guidance signals, such as labels, CLIP embeddings, or masks, directly onto the sampling trajectory. This approach allows for stable, high-fidelity control without retraining or denoiser backpropagation during sampling. Empirically, we improve conditional accuracy on CIFAR-10 by 37 percentage points over the strongest training-free baseline while offering $4\times$ faster sampling. Moreover, the same representations that support label and CLIP guidance also enable spatial control, such as mask-based guidance, without auxiliary models. Finally, our framework reveals a phase transition in the generative process, pinpointing the optimal time window for effective guidance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_28900
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spectral Guidance for Flexible and Efficient Control of Diffusion Models
Moreira, Gabriel
Marques, Manuel
Costeira, João Paulo
Xiong, Chenyan
Machine Learning
We introduce Spectral Guidance, a framework for controlling diffusion models by leveraging the intrinsic geometry of the generative process. As data is progressively corrupted by noise, only a small number of features remain informative for control. We characterize them as the singular functions of a conditional expectation operator and show that they can be learned via a self-supervised objective. Once recovered, this basis enables the projection of arbitrary guidance signals, such as labels, CLIP embeddings, or masks, directly onto the sampling trajectory. This approach allows for stable, high-fidelity control without retraining or denoiser backpropagation during sampling. Empirically, we improve conditional accuracy on CIFAR-10 by 37 percentage points over the strongest training-free baseline while offering $4\times$ faster sampling. Moreover, the same representations that support label and CLIP guidance also enable spatial control, such as mask-based guidance, without auxiliary models. Finally, our framework reveals a phase transition in the generative process, pinpointing the optimal time window for effective guidance.
title Spectral Guidance for Flexible and Efficient Control of Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28900