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What are Diffusion Models?

lilianweng.github.io · 4,764 words · saved by 6 readers

Diffusion models are a new type of generative models that are flexible enough to learn any arbitrarily complex data distribution while tractable to analytically evaluate the distribution. It has been shown recently that diffusion models can generate high-quality images and the performance is competitive to SOTA GAN.

[Updated on 2021-09-19: Highly recommend this blog post on score-based generative modeling by Yang Song (author of several key papers in the references)]. [Updated on 2022-08-27: Added classifier-free guidance, GLIDE, unCLIP and Imagen. [Updated on 2022-08-31: Added latent diffusion model. [Updated on 2024-04-13: Added progressive distillation, consistency models, and the Model Architecture section. So far, I’ve written about three types of generative models, GAN, VAE, and Flow-based models. They have shown great success in generating high-quality samples, but each has some limitations…

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