Blurring Diffusion Models

Understand

Recently, Rissanen et al., (2022) have presented a new type of diffusion process for generative modeling based on heat dissipation, or blurring, as an alternative to isotropic Gaussian diffusion.

• Here, we show that blurring can equivalently be defined through a Gaussian diffusion process with non-isotropic noise.
• In making this connection, we bridge the gap between inverse heat dissipation and denoising diffusion, and we shed light on the inductive bias that results from this modeling choice.
• Finally, we propose a generalized class of diffusion models that offers the best of both standard Gaussian denoising diffusion and inverse heat dissipation, which we call Blurring Diffusion Models.