f-DM: A Multi-stage Diffusion Model via Progressive Signal Transformation
Diffusion models (DMs) have recently emerged as SoTA tools for generative modeling in various domains. Standard DMs can be viewed as an instantiation of hierarchical variational autoencoders (VAEs) where the latent variables are inferred from input-centered Gaussian distributions with fixed scales and variances. Unlike VAEs, this formulation constrains DMs from changing the latent spaces and learning abstract representations. In this work, we propose f-DM, a generalized family of DMs which allows progressive signal transformation. More precisely, we extend DMs to incorporate a set of…
Visual generative models (e.g., diffusion models) typically operate in compressed latent spaces to balance training efficiency and sample quality. In parallel, there has been growing interest in leveraging high-quality pre-trained visual representations—either by aligning them inside VAEs or directly within the generative model. However, adapting such representations remains challenging due…