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Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

chenyang.co

21–30 of 44 posts

Re: Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

#21
post #4

Author here, when I tried to understand diffusion models I realized that the code and math can be greatly simplified, which led to me writing this blog post and diffusion library. Happy to answer any questions.

I am curious if any of these concepts derive somehow from some physics principles? Like the same way neural networks are modeled after biological neural networks? Maybe you have some insights on that conception?

Re: Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

#22
post #16

All machine learning models are convolutions, mark my words.

I think you posted this a few times, maybe you want to elaborate on this point? I have trouble seeing reinforcement learning as convolution, for example.

It's a Fredholm equation which in turn is a convolutional equation.

Re: Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

#23
post #2

oh this has code! great stuff. diffusion papers are famous for a lot of equations ( https://twitter.com/cto_junior/status/1766518604395155830 ) but code is much more legible (and precise?) for the rest of us. all theory papers should come with reference impl code. i'd love an extension of this for the diffusion transformer, which drives Sora and other videogen models. maybe combine this post with https://jaykmody.com…

They're famous for lots of equations, but truth be told, most diffusion researchers I know have the exact same response. A lot of people repeat the same exact equations and they only are there for review purposes. On the other hand, if you want to really dig in, I'd suggest reading into works by Kingma, Gao, Ricky Tian Qi Chen, and honestly, any of Max Welling's students (Tomczak (was post doc), Hoogeboom, etc), and…

How long before more legible code or code-like constructs (or markup?) start to displace arcane mathematical notation?

It would take quite a long time but I could see this slowly happening for analogous reasons to how the printing press favored alphabetic languages over pictorial ones. Computers teach us to read, write, and express linguistically and are now thanks to LLMs capable of working much more fluently with language. Squiggles and lots of Greek letters seem like an anachronism.

Re: Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

#24
post #4

Author here, when I tried to understand diffusion models I realized that the code and math can be greatly simplified, which led to me writing this blog post and diffusion library. Happy to answer any questions.

As a researcher, there's a lot of diffusion blogs that I do not like. But I actually really do like this one! It does a great job at getting to the meat of things, showing some of the complexities (often missing) but without getting lost or distracted. I especially like the discussion of trajectories as this is motivating to many things I think a lot of people struggle with (e.g. with schedulers). That can be hard to…

> FWIW, a friend of mine (and not "a friend of mine")

What? Do you mean a coworker or something as compared to a friend?

Re: Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a researcher, there's a lot of diffusion blogs that I do not like. But I actually really do like this one! It does a great job at getting to the meat of things, showing some of the complexities (often missing) but without getting lost or distracted. I especially like the discussion of trajectories as this is motivating to many things I think a lot of people struggle with (e.g. with schedulers). That can be hard to…

> FWIW, a friend of mine (and not "a friend of mine") What? Do you mean a coworker or something as compared to a friend?

[deleted]

Re: Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

#26
post #2

oh this has code! great stuff. diffusion papers are famous for a lot of equations ( https://twitter.com/cto_junior/status/1766518604395155830 ) but code is much more legible (and precise?) for the rest of us. all theory papers should come with reference impl code. i'd love an extension of this for the diffusion transformer, which drives Sora and other videogen models. maybe combine this post with https://jaykmody.com…

They're famous for lots of equations, but truth be told, most diffusion researchers I know have the exact same response. A lot of people repeat the same exact equations and they only are there for review purposes. On the other hand, if you want to really dig in, I'd suggest reading into works by Kingma, Gao, Ricky Tian Qi Chen, and honestly, any of Max Welling's students (Tomczak (was post doc), Hoogeboom, etc), and…

I’d probably say Karras has written the best papers on how to think about diffusion models.

Re: Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

#27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you posted this a few times, maybe you want to elaborate on this point? I have trouble seeing reinforcement learning as convolution, for example.

It's a Fredholm equation which in turn is a convolutional equation.

Next you're gonna say that polynomial multiplication is also just convolution of the arguments.

Re: Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a researcher, there's a lot of diffusion blogs that I do not like. But I actually really do like this one! It does a great job at getting to the meat of things, showing some of the complexities (often missing) but without getting lost or distracted. I especially like the discussion of trajectories as this is motivating to many things I think a lot of people struggle with (e.g. with schedulers). That can be hard to…

> FWIW, a friend of mine (and not "a friend of mine") What? Do you mean a coworker or something as compared to a friend?

They are clarifying that "a friend of mine" is not a euphemism for themselves, because it's more common to use it as a euphemism for yourself than it is to actually talk to strangers online about your friend's life, problems, opinions etc.

Re: Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a Fredholm equation which in turn is a convolutional equation.

Next you're gonna say that polynomial multiplication is also just convolution of the arguments.

It's not the standard convolution.

Re: Diffusion models from scratch, from a new theoretical perspective

#30
post #4

Author here, when I tried to understand diffusion models I realized that the code and math can be greatly simplified, which led to me writing this blog post and diffusion library. Happy to answer any questions.

This looks great! How long does it take (on what hardware) to train the toy models? Such as the `fashion_mnist.py` example? Thanks.
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