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Cold Diffusion: Inverting Arbitrary Image Transforms Without Noise

Arpit Bansal, Eitan Borgnia, Hong-Min Chu

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Jie S. Li, Hamid Kazemi, Furong Huang, Micah Goldblum, Jonas Geiping, Tom Goldstein

2022 · arXiv

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From the abstract

Standard diffusion models involve an image transform -- adding Gaussian noise -- and an image restoration operator that inverts this degradation. We observe that the generative behavior of diffusion models is not strongly dependent on the choice of image degradation, and in fact an entire family of generative models can be constructed by varying this choice. Even when using completely deterministic degradations (e.g., blur, masking, and more), the training and test-time update rules that underlie diffusion models can be easily generalized to create generative models. The success of these fully deterministic models calls into question the community's understanding of diffusion models, which relies on noise in either gradient Langevin dynamics or variational inference, and paves the way for generalized diffusion models that invert arbitrary processes. Our code is available at https://github.com/arpitbansal297/Cold-Diffusion-Models

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Original HN comments, with labels from simple text rules. A label describes the whole comment and may miss context or irony. Read the discussion to make up your own mind. About the labels

3 selected excerpts · 3 total mentions

GaggiX
Neutral mention · rule
I wrote a response yesterday but did not post it or send it, ops. I still don't understand the problem, if you ask model trained on a noise pattern "trees" for a forest it will still give you a random forest, that's what it was trained on, also: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09392, to see the diffusion process applied to processes other than Gaussian noise.
astrange
Neutral mention · rule
This claims to explain diffusion models from first principles, but the issue with explaining how they work is we don't know how they work. The explanation in the original paper turns out not to be true; you can get rid of most of their assumptions and it still works: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09392
krackers
Neutral mention · rule
I think it might be this paper [1] succintly described by the author in this twitter thread [2] [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09392 [2] https://twitter.com/tomgoldsteincs/status/156250381442263040...

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