Spectral-Guided Diffusion: Accelerating Inference via Static Spectral Layer Scheduling

arXiv:2609.29505v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion inference repeatedly evaluates the same large network. We ask whether pretrained weights alone can identify residual branches that need not be recomputed throughout the trajectory. Our \textbf{Spectral Concentration Ratio (SCR)} measures leading-versus-tail singular-value energy. Combined with Frobenius magnitude, it yields an offline sensitivity proxy and a deterministic lifetime for each scheduled unit. A frozen unit reuses its cached residual-branch update while the current residual stream and all external conditioning continue to propagate. The method needs no router, calibration prompts, or input-dependent search. At matched layer-step budgets, SCR/Frobenius preserves quality better than random, depth, norm, stable-rank, and Frobenius--stable-rank schedules on LLaDA-8B, DiT-XL/2, U-ViT-L, and SDXL. Broader LLaDA tests cover retrieval, reasoning, code, summarization, and open-ended generation; matched-horizon controls retain the ranking down to ten denoising steps. The complete captured-graph system reaches $2.8\times$--$3.0\times$ wall-clock speedup over eager inference. This is a systems-level number: on LLaDA, padded graph execution already gives $2.7\times$, while eliminating inactive branch work raises it to $3.0\times$. The perturbation analysis motivates pre-norm attention and MLP components under explicit local assumptions; results on AdaLN, U-shaped, convolutional, and cross-attention blocks are empirical transfer, not certified guarantees.