Diffusion Models - Part 3: DDIM
In Part 2 of the Diffusion Models series, I mentioned that Improved DDPM can match DDPM’s sample quality using only 100 steps instead of 1000, thanks to learned variance. That’s a 10x speedup and already a significant improvement. But if you’ve sat through a full 1000-step DDPM sampling loop, even 100 steps still feels slow. Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM; Song et al., 2021) takes a more radical approach to the speed problem. Instead of making the existing sampling loop more efficient, it asks: does the sampling loop even need to be Markovian in the first place? ...