View publication

Diffusion models (DMs) have recently emerged as SoTA tools for generative modeling in various domains. Standard DMs can be viewed as an instantiation of hierarchical variational autoencoders (VAEs) where the latent variables are inferred from input-centered Gaussian distributions with fixed scales and variances. Unlike VAEs, this formulation constrains DMs from changing the latent spaces and learning abstract representations. In this work, we propose f-DM, a generalized family of DMs which allows progressive signal transformation. More precisely, we extend DMs to incorporate a set of (hand-designed or learned) transformations, where the transformed input is the mean of each diffusion step. We propose a generalized formulation and derive the corresponding de-noising objective with a modified sampling algorithm. As a demonstration, we apply f-DM in image generation tasks with a range of functions, including down-sampling, blurring, and learned transformations based on the encoder of pretrained VAEs. In addition, we identify the importance of adjusting the noise levels whenever the signal is sub-sampled and propose a simple rescaling recipe. f-DM can produce high-quality samples on standard image generation benchmarks like FFHQ, AFHQ, LSUN, and ImageNet with better efficiency and semantic interpretation.

Related readings and updates.

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2023

Apple is sponsoring the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), which will be held as a hybrid virtual and in person conference from May 1 - 5 in Kigali, Rwanda. ICLR brings together professionals dedicated to the advancement of deep learning. Below is the schedule of Apple sponsored workshops and events at ICLR 2023.

See event details

Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon

Today, we are excited to release optimizations to Core ML for Stable Diffusion in macOS 13.1 and iOS 16.2, along with code to get started with deploying to Apple Silicon devices.

See paper details