Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis

Prafulla Dhariwal, Alex Nichol

2021 · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2,180 citations

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$\times$128, 4.59 on ImageNet 256$\times$256, and 7.72 on ImageNet 512$\times$512, and we match BigGAN-deep even with as…

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