# Unified Backbone Refinement for Diffusion Models via Internal-Latent Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09753 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09753/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 24 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14951/) (2021)
- [PixArt-Sigma: Weak-to-Strong Training of Diffusion Transformer for 4K Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04692/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models already have a Semantic Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10960/) (2022)
- [Perception Prioritized Training of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00227/) (2022)
- [Hunyuan-DiT: A Powerful Multi-Resolution Diffusion Transformer with Fine-Grained Chinese Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08748/) (2024)
- [FreeU: Free Lunch in Diffusion U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11497/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Model Made Slim](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17106/) (2022)
- [Self-Rectifying Diffusion Sampling with Perturbed-Attention Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17377/) (2024)
- [Understanding Hallucinations in Diffusion Models through Mode Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09358/) (2024)
- [Training-free Content Injection using h-space in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15403/) (2023)
- [Kandinsky 3: Text-to-Image Synthesis for Multifunctional Generative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21061/) (2024)
- [Detecting Human Artifacts from Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13842/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Hallucinations in Diffusion Models through Adaptive Attention Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16872/) (2025)
- [Temporal Score Analysis for Understanding and Correcting Diffusion Artifacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16218/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Diffusion Model Hallucinations with Dynamic Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05356/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, with performance closely related to the denoising backbones that parameterize the score function. In this paper, we present a systematic, phase-aware analysis of diffusion components and show that abrupt, early-stage fluctuations in deep latents are strongly associated with artifacts. Guided by these findings, we introduce DUNE (Diffusion Unified Network refiNEr), a training-free refinement framework that detects abrupt deviations in deep low-noise internal latents using a shared EMA-based criterion, and applies backbone-specific suppression to the detector-selected entries. Although derived from U-Net, the same detect-suppress principle extends naturally to Transformer-based diffusion models by acting on the latents of deep self-attention blocks. Extensive experiments across multiple backbones indicate that DUNE improves fidelity while reducing hallucinations, offering new insight into where and when diffusion backbones should be controlled.