Guidance for Low-Level Perceptual Editing in Unconditional Diffusion Models

Abstract

Unconditional diffusion models offer powerful generative priors, yet steering them toward aesthetically enhanced outputs remains largely unexplored. We show that h-space patching, the dominant paradigm for training-free diffusion editing, systematically fails for global, low-level transformations required for aesthetic and perceptual refinement. We introduce a novel, generalized framework for image-editing in unconditional diffusion models without explicit training. This inference-time mechanism operates on low-level features by extracting degradation concept vectors and combining bottleneck patching with classifier-free guidance to guide sampling away from the degraded manifold, producing consistently improved images without any model retraining.

11 pages, 12 figures, Generative Models for Computer Vision Workshop CVPR 2026