Continuous Diffusion Transformers for Designing Synthetic Regulatory Elements

We present a parameter-efficient Diffusion Transformer (DiT) for generating 200bp cell-type-specific regulatory DNA sequences. By replacing the U-Net backbone of DNA-Diffusion with a transformer denoiser equipped with a 2D CNN input encoder, our model matches the U-Net's best validation loss in 13 epochs (60$\times$ fewer) and converges 39\% lower, while reducing memorization from 5.3\% to 1.7\% of generated sequences aligning to training data via BLAT. Ablations show the CNN encoder is essential: without it, validation loss increases 70\% regardless of positional embedding choice. We further apply DDPO finetuning using Enformer as a reward model, achieving a 38$\times$ improvement in predicted regulatory activity. Cross-validation against DRAKES on an independent prediction task confirms that improvements reflect genuine regulatory signal rather than reward model overfitting.