General and Efficient Steering of Unconditional Diffusion Models

Conditioning unconditional diffusion models typically requires either retraining with conditional inputs or per-step gradient computations (e.g., classifier-based guidance), both of which incur substantial computational overhead. We present a general recipe for efficiently steering unconditional diffusion without gradient guidance during inference, enabling fast controllable generation. Our approach is built on two observations about diffusion model structure: Noise Alignment: even in early, highly corrupted stages, coarse semantic steering is possible using a lightweight, offline-computed guidance signal, avoiding any per-step or per-sample gradients. Transferable concept vectors: a concept direction in activation space once learned through Recursive Feature Machines (RFMs) transfers across both timesteps and samples; the same fixed steering vector learned near clean time remains effective when injected at intermediate noise levels for every generation trajectory, providing refined conditional control with efficiency. Experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and CelebA demonstrate improved accuracy/quality relative to gradient-based guidance, while achieving significant inference speedups.