E-SD$^3$: Fine-Grained Confidence-Aware Fusion of SD3 for Zero-Shot Semantic Matching
Jing Zuo, Jiaqi Wang, Yonggang Qi, Yi-Zhe Song
Recent work shows that features from Stable Diffusion (SD) and contrastively pretrained models like DINO can be directly used for zero-shot semantic correspondence via naive feature concatenation. In this paper, we explore the stronger potential of Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3), a rectified flow-based model with a multimodal transformer backbone (MM-DiT). We show that semantic signals in SD3 are scattered across multiple timesteps and transformer layers, and propose a multi-level fusion scheme to extract discriminative features. Moreover, we identify that naive fusion across models suffers from inconsistent distributions, thus leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective confidence-aware feature fusion strategy that re-weights each model’s contribution based on prediction confidence scores derived from their matching uncertainties. Notably, this fusion approach is not only training-free but also enables per-pixel adaptive integration of heterogeneous features. The resulting representation, E-SD$^3$, significantly outperforms strong baselines on SPair-71k, PF-Pascal, and PSC6K, validating the benefit of combining SD3, SD, and DINO through our proposed confidence-aware feature fusion.