Flat Features, Detailed Images? Simple Detail Control for Diffusion Transformers

Prompt engineering is commonly used to encourage text-to-image models to generate more detailed images. However, it does not provide reliable, continuous, or disentangled control. We analyze feature tokens produced with and without detail-enhancing prompts across six diffusion transformers and observe a common pattern: these prompts tend to increase the entropy of each token's energy distribution while largely preserving its ordering. That is, flattening the distribution increases the level of detail. Motivated by this counter-intuitive finding, we introduce a simple training-free approach that continuously adjusts the level of detail according to a scalar. Specifically, it shifts the squared channel magnitudes of each token toward a higher entropy distribution with a time-aware scheduler to concentrate the intervention at intermediate sampling steps. Across extensive experiments on different types of diffusion transformers, we show that our approach provides continuous control over detail metrics while largely preserving image quality and semantic structure. It requires only a few lines of code and adds negligible inference time overhead.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-11-02
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2611.02551
Primary Topic
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
Type
preprint
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preprint

Flat Features, Detailed Images? Simple Detail Control for Diffusion Transformers

Minghao Sun, Jiyang Zheng, Qingtao Yu, Dylan Campbell et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
preprint

Flat Features, Detailed Images? Simple Detail Control for Diffusion Transformers

Minghao Sun, Jiyang Zheng, Qingtao Yu, Dylan Campbell, Zhen Wang, Hongdong Li
preprint en

Abstract

Prompt engineering is commonly used to encourage text-to-image models to generate more detailed images. However, it does not provide reliable, continuous, or disentangled control. We analyze feature tokens produced with and without detail-enhancing prompts across six diffusion transformers and observe a common pattern: these prompts tend to increase the entropy of each token's energy distribution while largely preserving its ordering. That is, flattening the distribution increases the level of detail. Motivated by this counter-intuitive finding, we introduce a simple training-free approach that continuously adjusts the level of detail according to a scalar. Specifically, it shifts the squared channel magnitudes of each token toward a higher entropy distribution with a time-aware scheduler to concentrate the intervention at intermediate sampling steps. Across extensive experiments on different types of diffusion transformers, we show that our approach provides continuous control over detail metrics while largely preserving image quality and semantic structure. It requires only a few lines of code and adds negligible inference time overhead.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
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Flat Features, Detailed Images? Simple Detail Control for Diffusion Transformers — Minghao Sun, Jiyang Zheng, et al. · arXiv (Cornell University) (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS