Representative Guidance: Diffusion Model Sampling with Coherence

The diffusion sampling process faces a persistent challenge stemming from its incoherence, attributable to varying noise directions across different timesteps.Our Representative Guidance (RepG) offers a new perspective to address this issue by reformulating the sampling process with a coherent direction toward a representative target.From this perspective, classic classifier guidance reveals its drawback in lacking meaningful representative information, as the features it relies on are optimized for discrimination and tend to highlight only a narrow set of class-specific cues. This focus often sacrifices diversity and increases the risk of adversarial generation.In contrast, we leverage self-supervised representations as the coherent target and treat sampling as a downstream task—one that focuses on refining image details and correcting generation errors, rather than settling for oversimplified outputs.Our Representative Guidance achieves superior performance and demonstrates the potential of pre-trained self-supervised models in guiding diffusion sampling. Our findings show that RepG not only significantly improves vanilla diffusion sampling, but also surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks when combined with classifier-free guidance.