Representation Learning with Diffusion Models
This work addresses a limitation in diffusion models for image synthesis by enabling semantically meaningful representations, which is incremental as it builds on existing latent diffusion models.
The paper tackles the problem that diffusion models lack semantically meaningful representation spaces by introducing a framework for learning representations with diffusion models (LRDM), which conditions a latent diffusion model on representations from a separate encoder and jointly trains them, achieving competitive image generation results and enabling faithful reconstructions and semantic interpolations.
Diffusion models (DMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results for image synthesis tasks as well as density estimation. Applied in the latent space of a powerful pretrained autoencoder (LDM), their immense computational requirements can be significantly reduced without sacrificing sampling quality. However, DMs and LDMs lack a semantically meaningful representation space as the diffusion process gradually destroys information in the latent variables. We introduce a framework for learning such representations with diffusion models (LRDM). To that end, a LDM is conditioned on the representation extracted from the clean image by a separate encoder. In particular, the DM and the representation encoder are trained jointly in order to learn rich representations specific to the generative denoising process. By introducing a tractable representation prior, we can efficiently sample from the representation distribution for unconditional image synthesis without training of any additional model. We demonstrate that i) competitive image generation results can be achieved with image-parameterized LDMs, ii) LRDMs are capable of learning semantically meaningful representations, allowing for faithful image reconstructions and semantic interpolations. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/jeremiastraub/diffusion.