{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/controlling-latent-diffusion-using-latent","title":"Controlling Latent Diffusion Using Latent CLIP","arxiv_id":"2503.08455","date":"2025-03-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jason Becker","Chris Wendler","Peter Baylies","Robert West","Christian Wressnegger"],"abstract":"Instead of performing text-conditioned denoising in the image domain, latent diffusion models (LDMs) operate in latent space of a variational autoencoder (VAE), enabling more efficient processing at reduced computational costs. However, while the diffusion process has moved to the latent space, the contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) models, as used in many image processing tasks, still operate in pixel space. Doing so requires costly VAE-decoding of latent images before they can be processed. In this paper, we introduce Latent-CLIP, a CLIP model that operates directly in the latent space. We train Latent-CLIP on 2.7B pairs of latent images and descriptive texts, and show that it matches zero-shot classification performance of similarly sized CLIP models on both the ImageNet benchmark and a LDM-generated version of it, demonstrating its effectiveness in assessing both real and generated content. Furthermore, we construct Latent-CLIP rewards for reward-based noise optimization (ReNO) and show that they match the performance of their CLIP counterparts on GenEval and T2I-CompBench while cutting the cost of the total pipeline by 21%. Finally, we use Latent-CLIP to guide generation away from harmful content, achieving strong performance on the inappropriate image prompts (I2P) benchmark and a custom evaluation, without ever requiring the costly step of decoding intermediate images.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08455v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08455v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"controlling-latent-diffusion-using-latent","repo_url":"https://github.com/jsonBackup/Latent-CLIP-Demo","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"denoising","task_name":"Denoising"},{"task_slug":"descriptive","task_name":"Descriptive"},{"task_slug":"zero-shot-learning","task_name":"Zero-Shot Learning"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"zero-shot-classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"clip","method_name":"CLIP"},{"method_slug":"diffusion","method_name":"Diffusion"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}