Paper Detail

Diffusion Templates: A Unified Plugin Framework for Controllable Diffusion

Zhongjie Duan, Hong Zhang, Yingda Chen

huggingface Score 7.0

Published 2026-04-27 · First seen 2026-04-30

General AI

Abstract

Controllable diffusion methods have substantially expanded the practical utility of diffusion models, but they are typically developed as isolated, backbone-specific systems with incompatible training pipelines, parameter formats, and runtime hooks. This fragmentation makes it difficult to reuse infrastructure across tasks, transfer capabilities across backbones, or compose multiple controls within a single generation pipeline. We present Diffusion Templates, a unified and open plugin framework that decouples base-model inference from controllable capability injection. The framework is organized around three components: Template models that map arbitrary task-specific inputs to an intermediate capability representation, a Template cache that functions as a standardized interface for capability injection, and a Template pipeline that loads, merges, and injects one or more Template caches into the base diffusion runtime. Because the interface is defined at the systems level rather than tied to a specific control architecture, heterogeneous capability carriers such as KV-Cache and LoRA can be supported under the same abstraction. Based on this design, we build a diverse model zoo spanning structural control, brightness adjustment, color adjustment, image editing, super-resolution, sharpness enhancement, aesthetic alignment, content reference, local inpainting, and age control. These case studies show that Diffusion Templates can unify a broad range of controllable generation tasks while preserving modularity, composability, and practical extensibility across rapidly evolving diffusion backbones. All resources will be open sourced, including code, models, and datasets.

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BibTeX

@misc{duan2026diffusion,
  title = {Diffusion Templates: A Unified Plugin Framework for Controllable Diffusion},
  author = {Zhongjie Duan and Hong Zhang and Yingda Chen},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Controllable diffusion methods have substantially expanded the practical utility of diffusion models, but they are typically developed as isolated, backbone-specific systems with incompatible training pipelines, parameter formats, and runtime hooks. This fragmentation makes it difficult to reuse infrastructure across tasks, transfer capabilities across backbones, or compose multiple controls within a single generation pipeline. We present Diffusion Templates, a unified and open plugin framework },
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2604.24351},
  keywords = {diffusion models, controllable diffusion methods, template models, template cache, template pipeline, capability injection, KV-Cache, LoRA, diffusion backbones, modular design, composability, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2604.24351},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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