Deep learning notes 10: Diffusion models - noise to nice in few steps

#papers

This post if from a series of quick notes written primarily for personal usage while reading random ML/SWE/CS papers. As such they might be incomprehensible and/or flat out wrong.

DDPM - Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis

  • Input + sampled little bit of noise; repeated multiple times (~1000s) -> pure noise
    • x_0 = x; noise(x_t+1|x_t); process input image from data distr.: x, applied noise(…) multiple times -> image of noise
  • If we could invert this process -> generative model: random normal noise image -> original image
    • Learn to undo one “little bit of noise” step at a time: distribution noise(x_t-1|x_t)
    • Sample random noise image, undo noise 1000s times (each time get one step cleaner image) -> sample clean data distr.
    • Reversal gives us process of normal noise to data distribution
  • Noising up: q: noise(x_t+1|x_t) well-defined process of adding noise from Normal distribution
    • Each step depends only on output of previous step
    • Added noise has diagonal covariance matrix, is centered at last sample but down-scaled
    • Given large T and well behaved schedule, last step is nearly isotropic Gaussian distribution
    • Produces vast amount of data pairs of x_t-1, x_t
  • Denoising: p: noise(x_t-1|x_t) requires entire data distribution -> approximated via neural network
    • Reversal doesn’t predict single image but a whole distribution of images (that could’ve been previous step)
    • The output distribution is assumed to be gaussian (mean, covariance)
    • The gaussian distribution assumption is maintained for small noise-up steps
  • Combination of p and q is ~VAE (variational auto-encoder) -> just train it
    • The true distribution can be easily computed out of the both known training pairs
    • Loss forces the denoising network predicted distribution to be close do the true distribution
  • The predicted covariance can be either statically set (actually doesn’t work super-bad) or also predicted
    • If fixed: can be fixed based on the forward noise-up step parameters
  • Combination of two loss functions are used, for stability also resampled (early noise-up steps are more impactful)
    • Simple objective: L2 difference between true and predicted picture / noise
    • Variational loss: proper KL divergence VAE loss, including variance, …
  • Class-label guided generation can improve performance
    • Train class classifier not only for clean images, but also for noised images -> use them to steer the generation
    • Analogous to ~GANs; ~shifts the predicted distribution of the step-denoised-images to where specified label is likelier
  • Idea: Have GANs that have multiple discriminators along the path from noise to final image ~ merge these two approaches

Autoregressive Diffusion Models

  • New type of auto-regressive models: variables can be decoded in arbitrary order
  • Autoregressive models: produces tokens (words/patches/pixels) one after another
    • E.g. First word, based on priming with it a second word, based on first two a third, …
    • Usually a fixed order, for sentences starts with a first one, …
    • Repeat until the whole output has been generated
  • ARDMs: Don’t have to go first to last, order could be arbitrary
    • Can also produce multiple tokens at once reducing number of steps for lower accuracy
  • At the beginning all tokens are initialized (?randomly/zero?)
    • DNN (usually transformer) processes them -> per token output (e.g. distribution over categories)
    • A portion of them are sampled and decoded (argmax for categorization) -> concrete outputs for few tokens
    • Concrete outputs replace random inputs for the sampled tokens, DNN, new subset of tokens are decoded, …
    • Repeat until all tokens are sampled & set
  • ~Similar to BERT
    • Trained with random word within sentence masking -> predicts distribution over words for masked tokens
    • Training is similar to BERT, just with non-fixed blanked tokens ratio
  • During training: mask a portion of tokens, average losses for all at once
    • Sampling one timestep of one ordering where we decode & loss all of the remaining/maked tokens
    • Left to right allows taking only the next (one) tokens’s loss -> less noisy
  • Why can’t we sample all tokens at once?
    • Tokens aren’t independent -> argmax on one token (collapsing its distribution) influences other tokens’ disr.
    • Sampling multiple at once is faster (less steps necessary) but possibly less ideal outputs
  • Extensions:
    • Tokens could be re-sampled
    • Multiple pixels at a time can be sampled -> to get the order/token groups dynamic programming
  • Initially sample only more rough values (e.g. out of few colors), only later revisit & predict specific color
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