EM Distillation for One-step Diffusion Models

While diffusion models can learn complex distributions, sampling requires a computationally expensive iterative process. Existing distillation methods enable efficient sampling, but have notable limitations, such as performance degradation with very few sampling steps, reliance on training data access, or mode-seeking optimization that may fail to capture the full distribution. We propose EM Distillation (EMD), a maximum likelihood-based approach that distills a diffusion model to a one-step generator model with minimal loss of perceptual quality. Our approach is derived through the lens of Expectation-Maximization (EM), where the generator parameters are updated using samples from the joint distribution of the diffusion teacher prior and inferred generator latents. We develop a reparametrized sampling scheme and a noise cancellation technique that together stabilizes the distillation process. We further reveal an interesting connection of our method with existing methods that minimize mode-seeking KL. EMD outperforms existing one-step generative methods in terms of FID scores on ImageNet-64 and ImageNet-128, and compares favorably with prior work on distilling text-to-image diffusion models.

CAT3D: Create Anything in 3D with Multi-View Diffusion Models

Advances in 3D reconstruction have enabled high-quality 3D capture, but require a user to collect hundreds to thousands of images to create a 3D scene. We present CAT3D, a method for creating anything in 3D by simulating this real-world capture process with a multi-view diffusion model. Given any number of input images and a set of target novel viewpoints, our model generates highly consistent novel views of a scene. These generated views can be used as input to robust 3D reconstruction techniques to produce 3D representations that can be rendered from any viewpoint in real-time. CAT3D can create entire 3D scenes in as little as one minute, and outperforms existing methods for single image and few-view 3D scene creation. See our project page for results and interactive demos at https://cat3d.github.io .

Video Interpolation with Diffusion Models

We present VIDIM, a generative model for video interpolation, which creates short videos given a start and end frame. In order to achieve high fidelity and generate motions unseen in the input data, VIDIM uses cascaded diffusion models to first generate the target video at low resolution, and then generate the high-resolution video conditioned on the low-resolution generated video. We compare VIDIM to previous state-of-the-art methods on video interpolation, and demonstrate how such works fail in most settings where the underlying motion is complex, nonlinear, or ambiguous while VIDIM can easily handle such cases. We additionally demonstrate how classifier-free guidance on the start and end frame and conditioning the super-resolution model on the original high-resolution frames without additional parameters unlocks high-fidelity results. VIDIM is fast to sample from as it jointly denoises all the frames to be generated, requires less than a billion parameters per diffusion model to produce compelling results, and still enjoys scalability and improved quality at larger parameter counts.

Disentangled 3D Scene Generation with Layout Learning

We introduce a method to generate 3D scenes that are disentangled into their component objects. This disentanglement is unsupervised, relying only on the knowledge of a large pretrained text-to-image model. Our key insight is that objects can be discovered by finding parts of a 3D scene that, when rearranged spatially, still produce valid configurations of the same scene. Concretely, our method jointly optimizes multiple NeRFs from scratch - each representing its own object - along with a set of layouts that composite these objects into scenes. We then encourage these composited scenes to be in-distribution according to the image generator. We show that despite its simplicity, our approach successfully generates 3D scenes decomposed into individual objects, enabling new capabilities in text-to-3D content creation. For results and an interactive demo, see our project page at https://dave.ml/layoutlearning/

Inpaint3D: 3D Scene Content Generation using 2D Inpainting Diffusion

This paper presents a novel approach to inpainting 3D regions of a scene, given masked multi-view images, by distilling a 2D diffusion model into a learned 3D scene representation (e.g. a NeRF). Unlike 3D generative methods that explicitly condition the diffusion model on camera pose or multi-view information, our diffusion model is conditioned only on a single masked 2D image. Nevertheless, we show that this 2D diffusion model can still serve as a generative prior in a 3D multi-view reconstruction problem where we optimize a NeRF using a combination of score distillation sampling and NeRF reconstruction losses. Predicted depth is used as additional supervision to encourage accurate geometry. We compare our approach to 3D inpainting methods that focus on object removal. Because our method can generate content to fill any 3D masked region, we additionally demonstrate 3D object completion, 3D object replacement, and 3D scene completion.

ReconFusion: 3D Reconstruction with Diffusion Priors

3D reconstruction methods such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) excel at rendering photorealistic novel views of complex scenes. However, recovering a high-quality NeRF typically requires tens to hundreds of input images, resulting in a time-consuming capture process. We present ReconFusion to reconstruct real-world scenes using only a few photos. Our approach leverages a diffusion prior for novel view synthesis, trained on synthetic and multiview datasets, which regularizes a NeRF-based 3D reconstruction pipeline at novel camera poses beyond those captured by the set of input images. Our method synthesizes realistic geometry and texture in underconstrained regions while preserving the appearance of observed regions. We perform an extensive evaluation across various real-world datasets, including forward-facing and 360-degree scenes, demonstrating significant performance improvements over previous few-view NeRF reconstruction approaches.

Variational Prediction

Bayesian inference offers benefits over maximum likelihood, but it also comes with computational costs. Computing the posterior is typically intractable, as is marginalizing that posterior to form the posterior predictive distribution. In this paper, we present variational prediction, a technique for directly learning a variational approximation to the posterior predictive distribution using a variational bound. This approach can provide good predictive distributions without test time marginalization costs. We demonstrate Variational Prediction on an illustrative toy example.

Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generation

Large-scale generative models are capable of producing high-quality images from detailed text descriptions. However, many aspects of an image are difficult or impossible to convey through text. We introduce self-guidance, a method that provides greater control over generated images by guiding the internal representations of diffusion models. We demonstrate that properties such as the shape, location, and appearance of objects can be extracted from these representations and used to steer sampling. Self-guidance works similarly to classifier guidance, but uses signals present in the pretrained model itself, requiring no additional models or training. We show how a simple set of properties can be composed to perform challenging image manipulations, such as modifying the position or size of objects, merging the appearance of objects in one image with the layout of another, composing objects from many images into one, and more. We also show that self-guidance can be used to edit real images. For results and an interactive demo, see our project page at https://dave.ml/selfguidance/

Learning a Diffusion Prior for NeRFs

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have emerged as a powerful neural 3D representation for objects and scenes derived from 2D data. Generating NeRFs, however, remains difficult in many scenarios. For instance, training a NeRF with only a small number of views as supervision remains challenging since it is an under-constrained problem. In such settings, it calls for some inductive prior to filter out bad local minima. One way to introduce such inductive priors is to learn a generative model for NeRFs modeling a certain class of scenes. In this paper, we propose to use a diffusion model to generate NeRFs encoded on a regularized grid. We show that our model can sample realistic NeRFs, while at the same time allowing conditional generations, given a certain observation as guidance.

DreamBooth3D: Subject-Driven Text-to-3D Generation

We present DreamBooth3D, an approach to personalize text-to-3D generative models from as few as 3-6 casually captured images of a subject. Our approach combines recent advances in personalizing text-to-image models (DreamBooth) with text-to-3D generation (DreamFusion). We find that naively combining these methods fails to yield satisfactory subject-specific 3D assets due to personalized text-to-image models overfitting to the input viewpoints of the subject. We overcome this through a 3-stage optimization strategy where we jointly leverage the 3D consistency of neural radiance fields together with the personalization capability of text-to-image models. Our method can produce high-quality, subject-specific 3D assets with text-driven modifications such as novel poses, colors and attributes that are not seen in any of the input images of the subject.