# No Other Representation Component Is Needed: Diffusion Transformers Can Provide Representation Guidance by Themselves

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.02831 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02831/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 76 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion foundations and sampling](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-foundations-and-sampling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [What matters for Representation Alignment: Global Information or Spatial Structure?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10794/) (2025)
- [Distribution Matching Distillation Meets Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13649/) (2025)
- [Self-Supervised Flow Matching for Scalable Multi-Modal Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06507/) (2026)
- [Improved Baselines with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18324/) (2026)
- [D-OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Continuously Tuning Step-Distilled Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05204/) (2026)
- [Bridging Past and Future: Distribution-Aware Alignment for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14181/) (2025)
- [Selective Underfitting in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01378/) (2025)
- [Guiding a Diffusion Transformer with the Internal Dynamics of Itself](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24176/) (2025)
- [LayerSync: Self-aligning Intermediate Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12581/) (2025)
- [SRA 2: Variational Autoencoder Self-Representation Alignment for Efficient Diffusion Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17830/) (2026)
- [No Alignment Needed for Generation: Learning Linearly Separable Representations in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21565/) (2025)
- [SAMA: Factorized Semantic Anchoring and Motion Alignment for Instruction-Guided Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19228/) (2026)
- [DivControl: Knowledge Diversion for Controllable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23620/) (2025)
- [Hyperspherical Autoencoder for High-Fidelity Image Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22904/) (2026)
- [DreamWorld: Unified World Modeling in Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00466/) (2026)
- [Don't Retrain, Align: Adapting Autoregressive LMs to Diffusion LMs via Representation Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06885/) (2026)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Pixel-Space Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16887/) (2026)
- [DiverseDiT: Towards Diverse Representation Learning in Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04239/) (2026)
- [DiffusionBench: On Holistic Evaluation of Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24888/) (2026)
- [AHPA: Adaptive Hierarchical Prior Alignment for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03317/) (2026)
- [STRIDE: Training-Free Diversity Guidance via PCA-Directed Feature Perturbation in Single-Step Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11494/) (2026)
- [Into the ORBIT for Time Series: Training Regimes for Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13262/) (2026)
- [FRAMER: Frequency-Aligned Self-Distillation with Adaptive Modulation Leveraging Diffusion Priors for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01390/) (2025)
- [Realiz3D: 3D Generation Made Photorealistic via Domain-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13852/) (2026)
- [ReWorld: Representation Learning for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27504/) (2026)
- [Group Diffusion: Enhancing Image Generation by Unlocking Cross-Sample Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10954/) (2025)
- [RePack then Refine: Efficient Diffusion Transformer with Vision Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12083/) (2025)
- [MixFlow Training: Alleviating Exposure Bias with Slowed Interpolation Mixture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19311/) (2025)
- [Self-transcendence: Is External Feature Guidance Indispensable for Accelerating Diffusion Transformer Training?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07773/) (2026)
- [Improving Diffusion Generalization with Weak-to-Strong Segmented Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20584/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent studies have demonstrated that learning a meaningful internal representation can accelerate generative training. However, existing approaches necessitate to either introduce an off-the-shelf external representation task or rely on a large-scale, pre-trained external representation encoder to provide representation guidance during the training process. In this study, we posit that the unique discriminative process inherent to diffusion transformers enables them to offer such guidance without requiring external representation components. We propose SelfRepresentation Alignment (SRA), a simple yet effective method that obtains representation guidance using the internal representations of learned diffusion transformer. SRA aligns the latent representation of the diffusion transformer in the earlier layer conditioned on higher noise to that in the later layer conditioned on lower noise to progressively enhance the overall representation learning during only the training process. Experimental results indicate that applying SRA to DiTs and SiTs yields consistent performance improvements, and largely outperforms approaches relying on auxiliary representation task. Our approach achieves performance comparable to methods that are dependent on an external pre-trained representation encoder, which demonstrates the feasibility of acceleration with representation alignment in diffusion transformers themselves.