Dominant vs. Dominated: Concept-Level Generative Collapse in Diffusion Models

Title:Dominant vs. Dominated: Concept-Level Generative Collapse in Diffusion Models

Abstract:Text-to-image diffusion models have attracted significant attention for their ability to generate diverse, high-fidelity images. However, in multi-concept generation, one concept token often dominates the output while others are suppressed-a phenomenon we term the Dominant-vs-Dominated (DvD) imbalance. To systematically study this failure mode, we introduce DominanceBench and examine its underlying causes from both data and internal-mechanistic perspectives. Our controlled fine-tuning study, which mimics concept learning during diffusion-model training, shows that concepts learned from visually homogeneous (low-variation) concept-specific training images exhibit stronger dominance when composed with others. Cross-attention analysis indicates that dominant tokens concentrate attention in early denoising steps, followed by reduced representation of competing concepts. Head-ablation analysis further shows that this dominance is distributed across attention heads rather than localized. Overall, these findings characterize DvD as a systematic concept-level failure mode and provide a basis for more reliable and controllable multi-concept generation. DominanceBench will be released upon publication.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2512.20666 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2512.20666v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.20666 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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