Pixel-Space Post-Training of Latent-Diffusion Models

Christina Zhang, Simran Motwani, Matthew Yu, Ji Hou, Felix Juefei-Xu, Sam Tsai, Peter Vajda, Zijian He, Jialiang Wang

Keywords: latent diffusion models, fine-tuning, pixel space, image generation

TL;DR: By adding pixel-space supervision to latent diffusion models' post-training process, we can significantly improve image quality and detail preservation in the generated images without compromising text alignment.

Abstract: Latent diffusion models (LDMs) have made significant advancements in the field of image generation in recent years. One major advantage of LDMs is their ability to operate in a compressed latent space, allowing for more efficient training and deployment. However, despite these advantages, challenges with LDMs still remain. For example, it has been observed that LDMs often generate high-frequency details and complex compositions imperfectly. We hypothesize that one reason for these flaws is due to the fact that all pre- and post-training of LDMs are done in latent space, which is typically $8 \times 8$ lower spatial-resolution than the output images. To address this issue, we propose adding pixel-space supervision in the post-training process to better preserve high-frequency details. Experimentally, we show that adding a pixel-space objective significantly improves both supervised quality fine-tuning and preference-based post-training by a large margin on a state-of-the-art DiT transformer and U-Net diffusion models in both visual quality and visual flaw metrics, while maintaining the same text alignment quality.

Primary Area: generative models

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Submission Number: 828