Darren Lo

h-index4
2papers

2 Papers

LGDec 13, 2025
Composite Classifier-Free Guidance for Multi-Modal Conditioning in Wind Dynamics Super-Resolution

Jacob Schnell, Aditya Makkar, Gunadi Gani et al.

Various weather modelling problems (e.g., weather forecasting, optimizing turbine placements, etc.) require ample access to high-resolution, highly accurate wind data. Acquiring such high-resolution wind data, however, remains a challenging and expensive endeavour. Traditional reconstruction approaches are typically either cost-effective or accurate, but not both. Deep learning methods, including diffusion models, have been proposed to resolve this trade-off by leveraging advances in natural image super-resolution. Wind data, however, is distinct from natural images, and wind super-resolvers often use upwards of 10 input channels, significantly more than the usual 3-channel RGB inputs in natural images. To better leverage a large number of conditioning variables in diffusion models, we present a generalization of classifier-free guidance (CFG) to multiple conditioning inputs. Our novel composite classifier-free guidance (CCFG) can be dropped into any pre-trained diffusion model trained with standard CFG dropout. We demonstrate that CCFG outputs are higher-fidelity than those from CFG on wind super-resolution tasks. We present WindDM, a diffusion model trained for industrial-scale wind dynamics reconstruction and leveraging CCFG. WindDM achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality among deep learning models and costs up to $1000\times$ less than classical methods.

LGJun 3, 2025
SFBD Flow: A Continuous-Optimization Framework for Training Diffusion Models with Noisy Samples

Haoye Lu, Darren Lo, Yaoliang Yu

Diffusion models achieve strong generative performance but often rely on large datasets that may include sensitive content. This challenge is compounded by the models' tendency to memorize training data, raising privacy concerns. SFBD (Lu et al., 2025) addresses this by training on corrupted data and using limited clean samples to capture local structure and improve convergence. However, its iterative denoising and fine-tuning loop requires manual coordination, making it burdensome to implement. We reinterpret SFBD as an alternating projection algorithm and introduce a continuous variant, SFBD flow, that removes the need for alternating steps. We further show its connection to consistency constraint-based methods, and demonstrate that its practical instantiation, Online SFBD, consistently outperforms strong baselines across benchmarks.