In plain words: Image generators usually clean up noise with a U-Net; this swaps it for a transformer that works on small patches of a compressed picture. Bigger versions scored best, reaching a record 2.27 on a standard image-quality test.
Abstract · Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers
We explore a new class of diffusion models based on the transformer architecture. We train latent diffusion models of images, replacing the commonly-used U-Net backbone with a transformer that operates on latent patches. We analyze the scalability of our Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) through the lens of forward pass complexity as measured by Gflops. We find that DiTs with higher Gflops -- through increased transformer depth/width or increased number of input tokens -- consistently have lower FID. In addition to possessing good scalability properties, our largest DiT-XL/2 models outperform all prior diffusion models on the class-conditional ImageNet 512x512 and 256x256 benchmarks, achieving a state-of-the-art FID of 2.27 on the latter.
William Peebles, Saining Xie
arXiv:2212.09748 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Dec 19, 2022 · updated Mar 2, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Code, project page and videos available at https://www.wpeebles.com/DiT