Geometry-Aware Attention Guidance for Diffusion Models via Modern Hopfield Dynamics

Abstract

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) improves sample quality in diffusion models, but its dual-pass inference and reliance on null-condition training limit its use in few-step regimes. Attention-space guidance has emerged as a complementary paradigm that addresses this gap, yet why prior sparse-vs-dense attention guidance works remains elusive. We address this by analyzing attention extrapolation through Modern Hopfield dynamics, proving two directional properties of the sparse-dense discrepancy under shared conditioning that together certify it as a directionally consistent acceleration signal. Building on this, we propose Geometry-Aware Attention Guidance (GAG), a training-free, plug-and-play extrapolation rule that decomposes the discrepancy into parallel and orthogonal components relative to the retrieval direction, amplifying the convergence-aligned component while suppressing off-manifold noise; stability follows from a weak contraction property. We further provide an interpretation of this extrapolation as first-order Anderson Acceleration in attention space, offering a unified perspective on attention extrapolation methods. GAG is a universal method that generalizes across architectures (UNet, MMDiT) and sampling regimes (multi-step, few-step), consistently improving generation quality on diverse backbones, including FLUX.1, the recent FLUX.2, and Qwen-Image, with minimal computational overhead.