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.
Notes: Largest run with their architecture improvements is the ImageNet 512 variant. Table 7 suggests utilization is around 30% for largest models (though we only see 256 x 256 and 128 -> 512) Table 10: ImageNet 512 variant took 1914 V100-days of training 125e12 FLOP/sec * 1914 days * 24 h/day * 3600 sec/h * 0.3 = 6.2e21
Size Notes: Biggest models are trained on ImageNet 512x512. ImageNet ILSVRC has 1,281,167 images in the training set, but it is possible some were filtered due to size. Note that a smaller model was trained on LSUN {bedroom, horse, cat}, which forms a larger dataset: 3,033,042 + 2,000,340 + 1,657,266 = 6,690,648 images Epochs ≈ (1,940,000 * 256) / 1,300,000 ≈ 381 epochs
Notes: Largest model is denoted ImageNet 512, has 559M parameters