Position-aware SAE safety steering generalizes across domains within a diffusion model

Xue et al. build position-aware SAEs over functionally distinct DiT intervention sites in FLUX.1 Dev and Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large, used as two independent testbeds [xue-etal-2026-safedig-safety-steering-diffusion] Robustness-aware routing prioritizes intervention sites, and a frozen SAE encoder acts as a reusable sparse safety dictionary while only the decoder adapts to the target domain [xue-etal-2026-safedig-safety-steering-diffusion] Safety learned from known source risk domains generalizes to held-out or emerging target risk domains within a single model [xue-etal-2026-safedig-safety-steering-diffusion] The demonstrated transfer is within-model across risk domains, not cross-model between FLUX and SD3.5 [xue-etal-2026-safedig-safety-steering-diffusion]