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Common Diffusion Noise Schedules and Sample Steps Are Flawed (arxiv.org)
9 points by pmoriarty on May 18, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: Image generators learn to clean noise from pictures, but the usual schedule never wipes it away, so training doesn't match the pure noise used at generation time. Fixing that, plus sampler tweaks, lets Stable Diffusion make bright and dark images, not just medium ones.

Abstract · Common Diffusion Noise Schedules and Sample Steps are Flawed

We discover that common diffusion noise schedules do not enforce the last timestep to have zero signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and some implementations of diffusion samplers do not start from the last timestep. Such designs are flawed and do not reflect the fact that the model is given pure Gaussian noise at inference, creating a discrepancy between training and inference. We show that the flawed design causes real problems in existing implementations. In Stable Diffusion, it severely limits the model to only generate images with medium brightness and prevents it from generating very bright and dark samples. We propose a few simple fixes: (1) rescale the noise schedule to enforce zero terminal SNR; (2) train the model with v prediction; (3) change the sampler to always start from the last timestep; (4) rescale classifier-free guidance to prevent over-exposure. These simple changes ensure the diffusion process is congruent between training and inference and allow the model to generate samples more faithful to the original data distribution.

Shanchuan Lin, Bingchen Liu, Jiashi Li, Xiao Yang
arXiv:2305.08891 · cs.CV · submitted May 15, 2023 · updated Jan 23, 2024
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Also discussed: May 2023 (3 points, 0 comments)

Their comparison with offset noise ( https://www.crosslabs.org//blog/diffusion-with-offset-noise ) is kind of limited-- essentially dismissed as a hack since it breaks the diffusion conceptual model, but fails to argue that their rigorous approach actually works better.