(a) Overview of Semantic-First Diffusion (SFD).
Semantics (dashed curve) and textures (solid curve) follow asynchronous denoising trajectories.
SFD operates in three phases:
Stage I – Semantic initialization, where semantic latents denoise first;
Stage II – Asynchronous generation, where semantics and textures denoise jointly but asynchronously, with semantics ahead of textures;
Stage III – Texture completion, where only textures continue refining.
After denoising, the generated semantic latent s₁ is discarded, and the final image is decoded solely from the texture latent z₁.
(b) Training convergence on ImageNet 256×256 without guidance.
SFD achieves substantially faster convergence than DiT-XL/2 and LightningDiT-XL/1 by approximately 100× and 33.3×, respectively.
1@article{Pan2025SFD,
2 title={Semantics Lead the Way: Harmonizing Semantic and Texture Modeling with Asynchronous Latent Diffusion},
3 author={Pan, Yueming and Feng, Ruoyu and Dai, Qi and Wang, Yuqi and Lin, Wenfeng and Guo, Mingyu and Luo, Chong and Zheng, Nanning},
4 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.04926},
5 year={2025}
6}
7
