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JLT: Clean-Latent Prediction in Latent Diffusion Transformers

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AuthorsFuning Fu et al.
Year2026
HF Upvotes30
arXiv2605.27102
PDFDownload
HF PageView on Hugging Face

Abstract

Flow matching with clean-data prediction has shown that regressing the clean point can exploit low-dimensional structure more effectively than predicting an ambient noised quantity. We ask whether this principle remains useful after images are mapped into a learned latent space, where compression has already removed much of the raw pixel variability. We introduce JLT, a 130M latent diffusion Transformer over frozen FLUX.2 VAE codes, and compare clean-latent prediction with a matched velocity-prediction DiT under the same representation, backbone, and training settings. Although the three variables x, epsilon, and v are linearly convertible for a fixed corruption time, a local Gaussian analysis shows that velocity regression inherits an isotropic target-covariance floor and amplifies low-variance latent directions, while clean prediction damps them. On ImageNet 256 x 256, JLT-B/1 obtains FID-50K 2.50 with classifier-free guidance, with a large matched-target gap over velocity prediction. These results suggest that prediction targets in latent diffusion are representation-dependent geometric choices, rather than interchangeable algebraic parameterizations.


Engineering Breakdown

The Problem

On ImageNet 256 x 256, JLT-B/1 obtains FID-50K 2.50 with classifier-free guidance, with a large matched-target gap over velocity prediction.

The Approach

We introduce JLT, a 130M latent diffusion Transformer over frozen FLUX.2 VAE codes, and compare clean-latent prediction with a matched velocity-prediction DiT under the same representation, backbone, and training settings.

Key Results

These results suggest that prediction targets in latent diffusion are representation-dependent geometric choices, rather than interchangeable algebraic parameterizations.

Research Areas

This paper contributes to the following areas of AI/ML engineering:

  • Machine learning
  • Deep learning
  • Neural networks
  • Model optimization
  • AI systems
  • Cleanlatent

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