Hierarchically branched diffusion models leverage dataset structure for class-conditional generation

Alex M Tseng, Max W Shen, Tommaso Biancalani, Gabriele Scalia

Primary Area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)

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Keywords: diffusion model, conditional generation, scientific discovery, interpretability, continual learning

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TL;DR: Class-conditional diffusion models can be trained to share the diffusion timeline and model parameters according to similarity between classes

Abstract: Diffusion models have attained state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic objects, including when conditioning generation on class labels. Current class-conditional diffusion models, however, implicitly model the diffusion process on all classes in a flat fashion, ignoring any known relationships between classes. Class-labeled datasets, including those common in scientific domains, are rife with internal structure. To take advantage of this structure, we propose hierarchically branched diffusion models as a novel framework for class-conditional generation. Branched diffusion models explicitly leverage the inherent relationships between distinct classes in the dataset to learn the underlying diffusion process in a hierarchical manner. We highlight several advantages of branched diffusion models over the current state-of-the-art methods for class-conditional diffusion. Firstly, they can be easily extended to novel classes in a continual-learning setting at scale. Secondly, they enable more sophisticated forms of conditional generation, such as analogy-based conditional generation (i.e. transmutation). Finally, they offer a novel interpretability into the class-conditional generation process. We extensively evaluate branched diffusion models on several benchmark and large real-world scientific datasets, spanning different data modalities (images, tabular data, and graphs). We particularly highlight the advantages of branched diffusion models on a single-cell RNA-seq dataset, where our branched model leverages the intrinsic hierarchical structure between human cell types.

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Submission Number: 5985