Concurrence of Symmetry Breaking and Nonlocality Phase Transitions in Diffusion Models
Diffusion models undergo a phase transition in a critical time window during generation dynamics, with two complementary diagnoses of criticality. The symmetry breaking picture views the critical window as when trajectories bifurcate into different semantic minima of the energy landscape, whereas the nonlocality picture views the critical window as when local denoising fails. We study whether two notions of such phase transitions are concurrent in modern diffusion transformers. By evaluating the dynamics and outcomes of the generation trajectory, we observe a near-simultaneous occurrence of the non-locality and symmetry breaking critical times. Our work is the first to unify the two notio...
| Authors | Yifan F. Zhang, Fangjun Hu, Guangkuo Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 6 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 May 2026 |
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