Untwisting RoPE: Frequency Control for Shared Attention in DiTs
This addresses a specific bottleneck in multimodal generation for style transfer, enabling better control over content copying versus style alignment.
The paper tackled the problem of unintended content copying in shared-attention mechanisms for transformer-based generative models, showing that high-frequency components in Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) cause this issue, and by modulating RoPE frequency bands, it enabled stable style transfer without copying.
Positional encodings are essential to transformer-based generative models, yet their behavior in multimodal and attention-sharing settings is not fully understood. In this work, we present a principled analysis of Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE), showing that RoPE naturally decomposes into frequency components with distinct positional sensitivities. We demonstrate that this frequency structure explains why shared-attention mechanisms, where a target image is generated while attending to tokens from a reference image, can lead to reference copying, in which the model reproduces content from the reference instead of extracting only its stylistic cues. Our analysis reveals that the high-frequency components of RoPE dominate the attention computation, forcing queries to attend mainly to spatially aligned reference tokens and thereby inducing this unintended copying behavior. Building on these insights, we introduce a method for selectively modulating RoPE frequency bands so that attention reflects semantic similarity rather than strict positional alignment. Applied to modern transformer-based diffusion architectures, where all tokens share attention, this modulation restores stable and meaningful shared attention. As a result, it enables effective control over the degree of style transfer versus content copying, yielding a proper style-aligned generation process in which stylistic attributes are transferred without duplicating reference content.