Concurrence of Symmetry Breaking and Nonlocality Phase Transitions in Diffusion Models

ArXi:2605.04830v1 Announce Type: new Diffusion models undergo a phase transition in a critical time window during generation dynamics, with two complementary diagnoses of criticality. The symmetry breaking picture views the critical window as when trajectories bifurcate into different semantic minima of the energy landscape, whereas the nonlocality picture views the critical window as when local denoising fails. We study whether two notions of such phase transitions are concurrent in modern diffusion transformers.