Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable progress in image generation
quality, especially when guidance is used to control the generative process.
However, guidance requires a large amount of image-annotation pairs for
training and is thus dependent on their availability, correctness and
unbiasedness. In this paper, we eliminate the need for such annotation by
instead leveraging the flexibility of self-supervision signals to design a
framework for self-guided diffusion models. By leveraging a feature extraction
function and a self-annotation function, our method provides guidance signals
at various image granularities: from the level of holistic images to object
boxes and even segmentation masks. Our experiments on single-label and
multi-label image datasets demonstrate that self-labeled guidance always
outperforms diffusion models without guidance and may even surpass guidance
based on ground-truth labels, especially on unbalanced data. When equipped with
self-supervised box or mask proposals, our method further generates visually
diverse yet semantically consistent images, without the need for any class,
box, or segment label annotation. Self-guided diffusion is simple, flexible and
expected to profit from deployment at scale.

本文介绍了一种自导扩散模型的方法，它可以利用自我监督信号来提供图像生成的指导，而无需大量的图像注释对。通过结合特征提取功能和自注释功能，我们的方法可以为各种图像颗粒度提供指导信号，从整体图像到对象框甚至分割掩模。我们的实验表明，我们的方法在单标签和多标签图像数据集上总是优于无指导的扩散模型，甚至可能超过基于基础真实标签的指导，特别是在不平衡数据上。