Latent Diffusion U-Net Representations Contain Positional Embeddings and Anomalies

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in synthesizing realistic images, spurring interest in using their representations for various downstream tasks. To better understand the robustness of these representations, we analyze popular Stable Diffusion models using representational similarity and norms. Our findings reveal three phenomena: (1) the presence of a learned positional embedding in intermediate representations, (2) high-similarity corner artifacts, and (3) anomalous high-norm artifacts. These findings underscore the need to further investigate the properties of diffusion model representations before considering them for downstream tasks that require robust features. Project page:this https URL

@article{loos2025_2504.07008,
  title={ Latent Diffusion U-Net Representations Contain Positional Embeddings and Anomalies },
  author={ Jonas Loos and Lorenz Linhardt },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.07008},
  year={ 2025 }
}