A Noise is Worth Diffusion Guidance

🤗 Upvotes: 25 | cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG Authors: Donghoon Ahn, Jiwon Kang, Sanghyun Lee, Jaewon Min, Minjae Kim, Wooseok Jang, Hyoungwon Cho, Sayak Paul, SeonHwa Kim, Eunju Cha, Kyong Hwan Jin, Seungryong Kim Title: A Noise is Worth Diffusion Guidance Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03895v1 Abstract: Diffusion models excel in generating high-quality images. However, current diffusion models struggle to produce reliable images without guidance methods, such as classifier-free guidance (CFG). Are guidance methods truly necessary? Observing that noise obtained via diffusion inversion can reconstruct high-quality images without guidance, we focus on the initial noise of the denoising pipeline. By mapping Gaussian noise to `guidance-free noise', we uncover that small low-magnitude low-frequency components significantly enhance the denoising process, removing the need for guidance and thus improving both inference throughput and memory. Expanding on this, we propose \ours, a novel method that replaces guidance methods with a single refinement of the initial noise. This refined noise enables high-quality image generation without guidance, within the same diffusion pipeline. Our noise-refining model leverages efficient noise-space learning, achieving rapid convergence and strong performance with just 50K text-image pairs. We validate its effectiveness across diverse metrics and analyze how refined noise can eliminate the need for guidance. See our project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/NoiseRefine/.