Diffusion Classifiers Understand Compositionality, but Conditions Apply
Authors: name: Yujin Jeong; name: Arnas Uselis; name: Seong Joon Oh; name: Anna Rohrbach
Published: 2025-05-23 14:29:52

Abstract: Understanding visual scenes is fundamental to human intelligence. While
discriminative models have significantly advanced computer vision, they often
struggle with compositional understanding. In contrast, recent generative
text-to-image diffusion models excel at synthesizing complex scenes, suggesting
inherent compositional capabilities. Building on this, zero-shot diffusion
classifiers have been proposed to repurpose diffusion models for discriminative
tasks. While prior work offered promising results in discriminative
compositional scenarios, these results remain preliminary due to a small number
of benchmarks and a relatively shallow analysis of conditions under which the
models succeed. To address this, we present a comprehensive study of the
discriminative capabilities of diffusion classifiers on a wide range of
compositional tasks. Specifically, our study covers three diffusion models (SD
1.5, 2.0, and, for the first time, 3-m) spanning 10 datasets and over 30 tasks.
Further, we shed light on the role that target dataset domains play in
respective performance; to isolate the domain effects, we introduce a new
diagnostic benchmark Self-Bench comprised of images created by diffusion models
themselves. Finally, we explore the importance of timestep weighting and
uncover a relationship between domain gap and timestep sensitivity,
particularly for SD3-m. To sum up, diffusion classifiers understand
compositionality, but conditions apply! Code and dataset are available at
https://github.com/eugene6923/Diffusion-Classifiers-Compositionality.