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Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis

2021/05/11 by Prafulla Dhariwal, Alex Nichol, Dhariwal, Prafulla +1 · 1 voice · 1033 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Cell Image Analysis Techniques #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis #Model Reduction and Neural Networks #cs.AI #cs.CV #cs.LG #stat.ML

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2105.05233

openalex publication_date 2021/05/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We show that diffusion models can achieve image sample quality superior to the current state-of-the-art generative models. We achieve this on unconditional image synthesis by finding a better architecture through a series of ablations. For conditional image synthesis, we further improve sample quality with classifier guidance: a simple, compute-efficient method for trading off diversity for fidelity using gradients from a classifier. We achieve an FID of 2.97 on ImageNet 128×128, 4.59 on ImageNet 256×256, and 7.72 on ImageNet 512×512, and we match BigGAN-deep even with as few as 25 forward passes per sample, all while maintaining better coverage of the distribution. Finally, we find that classifier guidance combines well with upsampling diffusion models, further improving FID to 3.94 on ImageNet 256×256 and 3.85 on ImageNet 512×512. We release our code at https://github.com/openai/guided-diffusion

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