# AReA: Adaptive Receptive-Field Attention for Efficient High-Resolution Diffusion Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17227/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 54 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05977/) (2023)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01569/) (2023)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [YaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00071/) (2023)
- [MultiDiffusion: Fusing Diffusion Paths for Controlled Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08113/) (2023)
- [All are Worth Words: A ViT Backbone for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12152/) (2022)
- [Simple diffusion: End-to-end diffusion for high resolution images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11093/) (2023)
- [LongRoPE: Extending LLM Context Window Beyond 2 Million Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13753/) (2024)
- [ScaleCrafter: Tuning-free Higher-Resolution Visual Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07702/) (2023)
- [SyncDiffusion: Coherent Montage via Synchronized Joint Diffusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05178/) (2023)
- [DemoFusion: Democratising High-Resolution Image Generation With No ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16973/) (2023)
- [DiffCollage: Parallel Generation of Large Content with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17076/) (2023)
- [ARNIQA: Learning Distortion Manifold for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14918/) (2023)
- [Relay Diffusion: Unifying diffusion process across resolutions for image synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03350/) (2023)
- [Matryoshka Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15111/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating images beyond the training resolution of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) remains challenging, as the number of tokens grows rapidly with resolution, full attention becomes expensive, and outputs often suffer from structural distortions and degraded detail. We identify uniform full attention as the common source of both problems. Attending to all tokens at every step causes quadratic cost and exposes the model to more tokens and relative distances beyond the training range, pushing the model out of distribution. We observe that attention's effective receptive field narrows during denoising, from global in early steps that form structure to local in later steps that refine details. We propose AReA, a training-free attention mechanism whose receptive field evolves from coarse to fine, following the denoising progression. In early steps, AReA applies cross-scale coarse attention over downsampled keys and values, capturing global context, while in later steps it applies local attention within progressively shrinking windows. Without additional parameters or training, experiments show that AReA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art training-free baselines across target resolutions and different models, while also being faster and more efficient.