The Annotated Diffusion Model

In this blog post, we'll take a deeper look into Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (also known as DDPMs, diffusion models, score-based generative models or simply autoencoders) as researchers have been able to achieve remarkable results with them for (un)conditional image/audio/video generation. Popular examples (at the time of writing) include GLIDE and DALL-E 2 by OpenAI, Latent Diffusion by the University of Heidelberg and ImageGen by Google Brain. We'll go over the original DDPM paper by (Ho et al., 2020), implementing it step-by-step in PyTorch, based on Phil Wang's implementation - which itself is based on the original TensorFlow implementation. Note that the idea of diffusion for generative modeling was actually already introduced in (Sohl-Dickstein et al., 2015). However, it took until (Song et al., 2019) (at Stanford University), and then (Ho et al., 2020) (at Google Brain) who independently improved the approach.