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arXiv:2112.10752cs.CV

High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models

Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Dominik Lorenz, Patrick Esser, Björn Ommer

Abstract

By decomposing the image formation process into a sequential application of denoising autoencoders, diffusion models (DMs) achieve state-of-the-art synthesis results on image data and beyond. Additionally, their formulation allows for a guiding mechanism to control the image generation process without retraining. However, since these models typically operate directly in pixel space, optimization of powerful DMs often consumes hundreds of GPU days and inference is expensive due to sequential evaluations. To enable DM training on limited computational resources while retaining their quality and flexibility, we apply them in the latent space of powerful pretrained autoencoders. In contrast to previous work, training diffusion models on such a representation allows for the first time to reach a near-optimal point between complexity reduction and detail preservation, greatly boosting visual fidelity. By introducing cross-attention layers into the model architecture, we turn diffusion models into powerful and flexible generators for general conditioning inputs such as text or bounding boxes and high-resolution synthesis becomes possible in a convolutional manner. Our latent diffusion models (LDMs) achieve a new state of the art for image inpainting and highly competitive performance on various tasks, including unconditional image generation, semantic scene synthesis, and super-resolution, while significantly reducing computational requirements compared to pixel-based DMs. Code is available at https://github.com/CompVis/latent-diffusion .

arXiv comments
CVPR 2022
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.CVComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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Linked by 8 identifiable commenters in 9 comments across 9 threads, from Aug 2022 to Dec 2025.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments9 threads

    • > But no LLM used for that? Well, I mean, I self-hosted stable diffusion to be able to generate the teaser images and the award images (for the ranks in the Game Over Dialog). I only implemented the initial SD paper [1] back then so I have no clue whether the u-net architecture…

      cookiengineerView on HNParent context

    • > I don't think the "model collapse" problem is particularly important these days. I think you might misunderstand what model collapse is. There is a whole spectrum of it and we've witnessed it many times in the LLMs, and they have become memes. A fairly recent example is the…

      godelskiView on HNParent context

    • Everything you've said is _intuitively_ correct, but empirically wrong. I've experimented with training VAEs for audio diffusion for the last few months and here's what I found: - Although the best results for a stand-alone VAE might require increasing the KL loss weight as high…

      parlancexView on HNParent context

  1. Stanford A.I. Courses 1 comment
    • Yeah no problem, this is even closer to my area of focus! What do you know about physics and thermodynamics? I'd say a good intro for low background is from Tomczak[0]. He has a book, but the blog posts are nearly identical. He did a post doc with Max Welling (someone you should…

      godelskiView on HNParent context

    • The model was initially released in August 22, 2022, and everything from the GitHub organization that hosted the code, to the actual licenses being around and all the communication made it very clear that there was a bunch of groups involved with the model; Runway, CompVis, and…

      capablewebView on HNParent context

    • Very interesting, although I was expecting the Stable Diffusion paper[1] to be one of the most cited in 2022 [1]: High-Resolution Image Synthesis With Latent Diffusion Models, https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10752

      firechickenbirdView on HNParent context

  2. A Web UI for Stable Diffusion 1 comment
    • Yes, and another reason for the small model size and the novelty of the underlying paper [1], is that the diffusion model is not acting on the pixel space but rather on a latent space. This means that this 'latent diffusion model' does not only learn the task at hand (image…

      rassibassiView on HNParent context

    • It is fed using a fascinating mechanism called "cross-attention" that originated in the NN architecture called Transformer - which was used to achieve state-of-the-art translations. It uses something like associative memory, where a NN inside Stable Diffusion, that generates…

      DzugaruView on HNParent context

    • It is from the Heidelberg giants, Patrick Esser and Robin Rombach They continued building off their latent diffusion direction (encode with vqgan-vae and then diffusion in latent space) All roads lead to rome https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion…

      lucidrainsView on HNParent context

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