Recent diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have shown remarkable abilities of generated content, however, they often suffer from complex forward processes, resulting in inefficient solutions for the reversed process and prolonged sampling times. In this paper, we aim to address the aforementioned challenges by focusing on the diffusion process itself that we propose to decouple the intricate diffusion process into two comparatively simpler process to improve the generative efficacy and speed. In particular, we present a novel diffusion paradigm named DDM (\textbf{D}ecoupled \textbf{D}iffusion \textbf{M}odels) based on the It\^{o} diffusion process, in which the image distribution is approximated by an explicit transition probability while the noise path is controlled by the standard Wiener process. We find that decoupling the diffusion process reduces the learning difficulty and the explicit transition probability improves the generative speed significantly. We prove a new training objective for DPM, which enables the model to learn to predict the noise and image components separately. Moreover, given the novel forward diffusion equation, we derive the reverse denoising formula of DDM that naturally supports fewer steps of generation without ordinary differential equation (ODE) based accelerators. Our experiments demonstrate that DDM outperforms previous DPMs by a large margin in fewer function evaluations setting and gets comparable performances in long function evaluations setting. We also show that our framework can be applied to image-conditioned generation and high-resolution image synthesis, and that it can generate high-quality images with only 10 function evaluations.

本文提出了一种名为DDM的扩散模型，通过将复杂的扩散过程分解为两个相对简单的过程，来提高生成效果和速度，它通过显式转移概率近似图像分布，并通过标准维纳过程控制噪声路径；文章还提出了一个新的DPM训练目标，能够分别预测噪声和图像成分，同时，DDM的逆向去噪公式可以自然地支持少数的生成步骤（不需要基于ODE的加速器），实验结果表明，DDM在更少的函数评估方面优于以前的DPM。

具有明确转移概率的解耦扩散模型