Generalized Consistency Trajectory Models for Image Manipulation
This work addresses the high computational cost of diffusion models for image manipulation, offering a more efficient alternative for researchers and practitioners in computer vision.
The authors tackled the computational inefficiency of diffusion models by proposing Generalized Consistency Trajectory Models (GCTMs), which enable translation between arbitrary distributions via ODEs with a single function evaluation, achieving effective performance in image manipulation tasks like translation, restoration, and editing.
Diffusion models (DMs) excel in unconditional generation, as well as on applications such as image editing and restoration. The success of DMs lies in the iterative nature of diffusion: diffusion breaks down the complex process of mapping noise to data into a sequence of simple denoising tasks. Moreover, we are able to exert fine-grained control over the generation process by injecting guidance terms into each denoising step. However, the iterative process is also computationally intensive, often taking from tens up to thousands of function evaluations. Although consistency trajectory models (CTMs) enable traversal between any time points along the probability flow ODE (PFODE) and score inference with a single function evaluation, CTMs only allow translation from Gaussian noise to data. This work aims to unlock the full potential of CTMs by proposing generalized CTMs (GCTMs), which translate between arbitrary distributions via ODEs. We discuss the design space of GCTMs and demonstrate their efficacy in various image manipulation tasks such as image-to-image translation, restoration, and editing.