UDPM: Upsampling Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) have recently gained significant attention. DDPMs compose a Markovian process that begins in the data domain and gradually adds noise until reaching pure white noise. DDPMs generate high-quality samples from complex data distributions by defining an inverse process and training a deep neural network to learn this mapping. However, these models are inefficient because they require many diffusion steps to produce aesthetically pleasing samples. Additionally, unlike generative adversarial networks (GANs), the latent space of diffusion models is less interpretable. In this work, we propose to generalize the denoising diffusion process into an Upsampling Diffusion Probabilistic Model (UDPM). In the forward process, we reduce the latent variable dimension through downsampling, followed by the traditional noise perturbation. As a result, the reverse process gradually denoises and upsamples the latent variable to produce a sample from the data distribution. We formalize the Markovian diffusion processes of UDPM and demonstrate its generation capabilities on the popular FFHQ, AFHQv2, and CIFAR10 datasets. UDPM generates images with as few as three network evaluations, whose overall computational cost is less than a single DDPM or EDM step, while achieving an FID score of 6.86. This surpasses current state-of-the-art efficient diffusion models that use a single denoising step for sampling. Additionally, UDPM offers an interpretable and interpolable latent space, which gives it an advantage over traditional DDPMs. Our code is available online: \url{https://github.com/shadyabh/UDPM/}

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Peer review

Reviewer ZKuR5/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-05

Summary

This paper introduces a novel generative model called the Upsampling Diffusion Probabilistic Model (UPDM). UPDM aims to decrease the number of diffusion steps needed to generate high-quality images, resulting in a significantly improved efficiency compared to previous methods.

Strengths

1. This paper is well-written, and the organization is great. 2. The motivation is clear enough.

Weaknesses

1. Some symbols are not fully explained when they are used at the first time. 2. The datasets might be fully able to valid the effectiveness of your method. 3. The compared methods are relatively out-of-date. 4. The comparison metric is only FID. 5. Some commas and labels in several equations are missing.

Questions

1. In ColdDIffuison, blur and noise can be utilized to train a diffusion model. In your method, downsample and noise is utilized at the same time to train a diffusion model. Please re-clarify your main contribution expect for this. 2. Please re-clarify the details for your network to handle images with different resolution. 3. Can you explain how you balance the weights of L{simple}, L{per}, and L{adv}. Please provide more ablation studies. 4. Please compare the generation speed with other methods that speed up DDPM. 5. Please provide more details about your network. 6. How did the authors assure that 3 steps will obtain best performance?

Rating

5

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

The authors have addressed the limitations and potential negative societal impact of their work.

Reviewer AGqF6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-10

Summary

The paper discusses the Gaussian diffusion modeling at different dimensionality by incorporating downsampling in the forward process. As a solution, the authors propose a new model called Upsampling Diffusion Probabilistic Model (UDPM), which reduces the latent variable dimension before adding noise. The reverse process then gradually denoises and upsamples the latent variable to produce a final image and tackles the computationally inefficient problem in previous diffusion models like DDPM. In the experiment, UDPM can generate images within 3 stages, which is computationally cheaper than a single step in DDPM and achieves better results.

Strengths

- The method is novel and explores a diffusion process across variance scale and dimensionality. The proposed solution is technically sound. - The proposed method is computationaly efficient compared to previous diffusion models, which were designed on a fixed dimensionality and relied a following cascade of upsampling models to reach higher dimension. - The paper is overall easy to read and well organized.

Weaknesses

- The authors do not elaborate on how do we determine the number of upsampling stages are needed. Moreover, how do we choose the resolutions in the training in order to balance the performance and computation cost? The authors may need to provide heuristics, theoretical analysis or empirical studies to guide the authors on the choices. - The expression "steps $<1$" is not rigorous. Using NFEs (numbers of fuction evaluation) and GPU time (or FLOPs) at different resolution stages may be more informative to the readers. - Some important related works are missing and lack of discussion. For example, Simple Diffusion studies the diffusion schedule in terms of the image dimensionality; LEGO diffusion and Matryoshka diffusion also discuss the diffusion modeling with variable dimensionality and the solutions are closely related. Emiel Hoogeboom, Jonathan Heek, and Tim Salimans. "simple diffusion: End-to-end diffusion for high resolution images." In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 13213-13232. PMLR, 2023. Huangjie Zheng, Zhendong Wang, Jianbo Yuan, Guanghan Ning, Pengcheng He, Quanzeng You, Hongxia Yang, and Mingyuan Zhou. "Learning stackable and skippable LEGO bricks for efficient, reconfigurable, and variable-resolution diffusion modeling." In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations. 2023. Jiatao Gu, Shuangfei Zhai, Yizhe Zhang, Joshua M. Susskind, and Navdeep Jaitly. "Matryoshka diffusion models." In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations. 2023. --------------- Some minors: - Some references are not precisely cited. For example, Adir [1] and Wavelet SGM [12] missed the conference/journal title; ; score-sde [36] was published in ICLR 2021, DDGAN [40] was published in ICLR 2022, TDPM [42] was published in ICLR 2023.

Questions

Please see the Weakness.

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

The authors have discussed the limitations and potential negative societal impact of their work.

Reviewer 9qFt4/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-12

Summary

This paper proposes a new training and sampling scheme for a diffusion model. The motivation is to enhance the effectiveness and interpretability of the diffusion model. Building upon the methods of DDPM, this paper introduces an upsampling operation into the Markov process, enabling the model to denoise and upsample simultaneously. Furthermore, through mathematical derivations, the reliability of this process is demonstrated. Experimental results ultimately show that in certain specific scenarios, the model outperforms existing alternatives.

Strengths

+ The paper is well-written with a clear organizational structure, making it easy to follow. + The paper propose a new diffusion model framework, complete with mathematical derivations, resulting in a loss function analogous to that used in DDPM. + The discussion and comparison with related work, such as cold diffusion and soft diffusion, are clearly articulated, effectively highlighting the technical contributions of this paper.

Weaknesses

- The motivation behind the study is not sufficiently clear, and the interpretability of the model has not been well demonstrated. - There is a lack of ablation studies on the loss function. The complexity of the loss, especially with adversarial training, may lead to instability during training. - The experiments were conducted only at a 64x64 resolution, leaving the scalability of the method unclear.

Questions

- What is the computational logic behind steps less than 1 in Table 1? Could you please provide a clear explanation? - It appears that this method involves special design considerations for the network structure. What is the actual inference latency of this model compared to baselines? - Traditional diffusion models, such as EDM, achieve significantly better results with more sampling steps due to their scalability. How scalable is the proposed method, and how does its performance compare?

Rating

4

Confidence

3

Soundness

2

Presentation

2

Contribution

2

Limitations

The authors have adequately addressed the limitations and potential negative societal impact of their work.

Reviewer ZKuR2024-08-10

Review response

I've thoroughly reviewed the authors' responses and appreciate their thoughtful engagement. I will stay in touch for further discussion as we approach the final rating.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Dear Reviewer, Thank you very much for your thoughtful feedback and for acknowledging that we have addressed the concerns you raised in your reviews. We appreciate the time and effort you put into evaluating our work and the constructive comments you provided. If there are any additional questions or if further clarification is needed, please feel free to let us know. We are happy to provide any further information, and we hope you will consider re-evaluating your score as for acceptance in Neurips the score needs to be around 6. Thank you once again for your valuable input. Best regards, The Authors

Reviewer AGqF2024-08-10

I appreciate the authors' efforts in addressing my concerns and questions. After reading the rebuttal, I will keep my positive recommendation, and I suggest the authors incorporate the discussions and additional content of the rebuttal into the final revision.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Dear Reviewer, Thank you very much for your thoughtful feedback and for acknowledging that we have addressed the concerns you raised in your reviews. We appreciate the time and effort you put into evaluating our work and the constructive comments you provided. If there are any additional questions or if further clarification is needed, please feel free to let us know. We are happy to provide any further information, and we hope you will consider re-evaluating your score as for acceptance in Neurips the score needs to be around 6. Thank you once again for your valuable input. Best regards, The Authors

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Dear Reviewer, Thank you for taking the time to review our work. As the discussion period is approaching its conclusion (on August 13, AOE), we kindly ask if you could review our detailed responses to your concerns. We would be happy to address any further questions you might have, and we hope you will consider re-evaluating your score as for acceptance in Neurips the score needs to be around 6. Thank you again for your efforts. Best regards, The Authors

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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