Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Nina Konovalova

Publications and source records attributed to Nina Konovalova.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits. While transcoder-based circuit tracing has recently enabled detailed causal analyses of large language models, multimodal diffusion transformers for image generation remain comparatively opaque. We still lack tools for understanding how semantic information propagates across denoising steps and how text and image representations interact within double-stream MM-DiT architectures. Existing methods provide only partial insight: attention maps expose a limited view of token interactions, while sparse autoencoders can discover interpretable features but do not directly reveal how these features are transformed and composed through nonlinear MLP layers. In this work, we extend transcoder-based circuit tracing to multimodal diffusion transformers. We train timestep-conditioned transcoders that faithfully approximate the input-output behavior of MLP sublayers in FLUX.1[schnell]. By replacing MLPs with transcoders and linearizing the remaining computation, we obtain exact feature-to-feature attribution and recover compact, interpretable circuits. Empirically, our transcoders match or slightly outperform sparse autoencoders on the sparsity-faithfulness tradeoff. The resulting circuits reveal mechanisms underlying attribute binding and cross-stream semantic propagation, and provide causal explanations for systematic generation errors. Moreover, circuit-guided interventions are substantially more precise and effective than standard SAE-based steering. Our results demonstrate that transcoder-based circuit analysis is feasible for state-of-the-art diffusion transformers and provides a powerful framework for understanding and controlling multimodal generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/Artalmaz31/DifFRACT

cs.CV↗

SHIFT: Steering Hidden Intermediates in Flow Transformers

Diffusion models have become leading approaches for high-fidelity image generation. Recent DiT-based diffusion models, in particular, achieve strong prompt adherence while producing high-quality samples. We propose SHIFT, a simple but effective and lightweight framework for concept removal in DiT diffusion models via targeted manipulation of intermediate activations at inference time, inspired by activation steering in large language models. SHIFT learns steering vectors that are dynamically applied to selected layers and timesteps to suppress unwanted visual concepts while preserving the prompt's remaining content and overall image quality. Beyond suppression, the same mechanism can shift generations into a desired \emph{style domain} or bias samples toward adding or changing target objects. We demonstrate that SHIFT provides effective and flexible control over DiT generation across diverse prompts and targets without time-consuming retraining.

cs.CV↗

Heeding the Inner Voice: Aligning ControlNet Training via Intermediate Features Feedback

Despite significant progress in text-to-image diffusion models, achieving precise spatial control over generated outputs remains challenging. ControlNet addresses this by introducing an auxiliary conditioning module, while ControlNet++ further refines alignment through a cycle consistency loss applied only to the final denoising steps. However, this approach neglects intermediate generation stages, limiting its effectiveness. We propose InnerControl, a training strategy that enforces spatial consistency across all diffusion steps. Our method trains lightweight convolutional probes to reconstruct input control signals (e.g., edges, depth) from intermediate UNet features at every denoising step. These probes efficiently extract signals even from highly noisy latents, enabling pseudo ground truth controls for training. By minimizing the discrepancy between predicted and target conditions throughout the entire diffusion process, our alignment loss improves both control fidelity and generation quality. Combined with established techniques like ControlNet++, InnerControl achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse conditioning methods (e.g., edges, depth).

cs.CV↗

DepthART: Monocular Depth Estimation as Autoregressive Refinement Task

Monocular depth estimation has seen significant advances through discriminative approaches, yet their performance remains constrained by the limitations of training datasets. While generative approaches have addressed this challenge by leveraging priors from internet-scale datasets, with recent studies showing state-of-the-art results using fine-tuned text-to-image diffusion models, there is still room for improvement. Notably, autoregressive generative approaches, particularly Visual AutoRegressive modeling, have demonstrated superior results compared to diffusion models in conditioned image synthesis, while offering faster inference times. In this work, we apply Visual Autoregressive Transformer (VAR) to the monocular depth estimation problem. However, the conventional GPT-2-style training procedure (teacher forcing) inherited by VAR yields suboptimal results for depth estimation. To address this limitation, we introduce DepthART - a novel training method formulated as a Depth Autoregressive Refinement Task. Unlike traditional VAR training with static inputs and targets, our method implements a dynamic target formulation based on model outputs, enabling self-refinement. By utilizing the model's own predictions as inputs instead of ground truth token maps during training, we frame the objective as residual minimization, effectively reducing the discrepancy between training and inference procedures. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed training approach significantly enhances the performance of VAR in depth estimation tasks. When trained on Hypersim dataset using our approach, the model achieves superior results across multiple unseen benchmarks compared to existing generative and discriminative baselines.

cs.CV↗

A3D: Does Diffusion Dream about 3D Alignment?

We tackle the problem of text-driven 3D generation from a geometry alignment perspective. Given a set of text prompts, we aim to generate a collection of objects with semantically corresponding parts aligned across them. Recent methods based on Score Distillation have succeeded in distilling the knowledge from 2D diffusion models to high-quality representations of the 3D objects. These methods handle multiple text queries separately, and therefore the resulting objects have a high variability in object pose and structure. However, in some applications, such as 3D asset design, it may be desirable to obtain a set of objects aligned with each other. In order to achieve the alignment of the corresponding parts of the generated objects, we propose to embed these objects into a common latent space and optimize the continuous transitions between these objects. We enforce two kinds of properties of these transitions: smoothness of the transition and plausibility of the intermediate objects along the transition. We demonstrate that both of these properties are essential for good alignment. We provide several practical scenarios that benefit from alignment between the objects, including 3D editing and object hybridization, and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. https://voyleg.github.io/a3d/

cs.CV↗

Natural superheavy nuclei in astrophysical data

The paper presents the summary data of the authors' research within the framework of the OLIMPIYA project (the Russian acronym of {\bf OLI}viny iz {\bf M}eteoritov --- {\bf P}oisk tyazholykh {\bf I} sverkhtyazholykh {\bf YA}der / Olivines from meteorites: Search for heavy and superheavy nuclei) and results of track analysis for heavy cosmic ray nuclei (\emph{Z} = 26--129) in olivine crystals from meteorites using an original processing technique. A total of 21,743 tracks of nuclei heavier than iron have been identified in meteoritic matter to date to form the largest database within this charge range. The database includes three tracks of superheavy nuclei with the lifetimes of about a few decades, which can be considered as direct experimental evidence for the existence of natural superheavy nuclei from the "island of stability". Comprehensive comparative analysis of data from two meteorites with different cosmic ray exposure ages, Marjalahti (from 178 to 205 Myr) and Eagle Station (from 35 to 71 Myr), is presented for the first time. The results are discussed within the existing concepts of nuclei formation in astrophysical processes.

nucl-ex↗