# Where to Look Is Not How to Fix: Pre-Denoising Diagnostics and Modality-Dependent Control in Diffusion Composition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03068 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03068/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 35 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01644/) (2016)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [Probing Classifiers: Promises, Shortcomings, and Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12452/) (2021)
- [Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13826/) (2023)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)
- [Winoground: Probing Vision and Language Models for Visio-Linguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03162/) (2022)
- [Causal Abstractions of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02997/) (2021)
- [Training-Free Structured Diffusion Guidance for Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05032/) (2022)
- [SugarCrepe: Fixing Hackable Benchmarks for Vision-Language Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14610/) (2023)
- [Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Compositional Generation with Energy-Based Diffusion Models and MCMC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11552/) (2023)
- [FreeU: Free Lunch in Diffusion U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11497/) (2023)
- [CREPE: Can Vision-Language Foundation Models Reason Compositionally?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07796/) (2022)
- [Linguistic Binding in Diffusion Models: Enhancing Attribute Correspondence through Attention Map Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08877/) (2023)
- [Interpreting CLIP with Sparse Linear Concept Embeddings (SpLiCE)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10376/) (2024)
- [Does CLIP Bind Concepts? Probing Compositionality in Large Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10537/) (2022)
- [Compositional Abilities Emerge Multiplicatively: Exploring Diffusion Models on a Synthetic Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09336/) (2023)
- [Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Map Control of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13921/) (2023)
- [Divide & Bind Your Attention for Improved Generative Semantic Nursing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10864/) (2023)
- [Improving Compositional Attribute Binding in Text-to-Image Generative Models via Enhanced Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07844/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding compositional failures in text-to-image diffusion requires identifying both where stress is detectable and how intervention changes the output. We study these questions through a controlled anchor--stress protocol that jointly evaluates text-encoder diagnostics and denoiser interventions. We introduce a text-only Compositional Stress Index (CSI), which separates common from rare compositions across SD1.5, SDXL, and the SD3 text path and provides an upstream diagnostic coordinate. A matched six-prompt localization study links intervention location to distinct outcomes: residual-minimizing embedding adapters improve representation fit, while downstream cross-attention intervention increases color hit rate (CHR) by 0.0272. Across SD1.5 and SDXL denoiser blocks, the largest positive signed diagnostic-accessibility mean occurs at the deep encoder, whereas selective boost has its largest positive mean CHR response at decoder blocks. Selective subtraction and broad ablation reveal further modality- and architecture-dependent responses, including a substantial CHR decrease when SDXL decoder cross-attention is broadly ablated. We find a diagnosis-control dissociation under our controlled attribute-object composition setting: compositional defects are diagnosable before denoising, but the representation coordinate that exposes risk is not necessarily the coordinate or modality that improves generation.