ToddlerDiffusion: Interactive Structured Image Generation with Cascaded Schrödinger Bridge
Eslam Mohamed BAKR Liangbing Zhao Vincent Tao Hu Matthieu Cord Patrick Perez Mohamed Elhoseiny
Diffusion models break down the challenging task of generating data from high-dimensional distributions into a series of easier denoising steps. Inspired by this paradigm, we propose a novel approach that extends the diffusion framework into modality space, decomposing the complex task of RGB image generation into simpler, interpretable stages. Our method, termed {\papernameAbbrev}, cascades modality-specific models, each responsible for generating an intermediate representation, such as contours, palettes, and detailed textures, ultimately culminating in a high-quality RGB image.
Instead of relying on the naive LDM concatenation conditioning mechanism to connect the different stages together, we employ Schr\"odinger Bridge to determine the optimal transport between different modalities.
Although employing a cascaded pipeline introduces more stages, which could lead to a more complex architecture, each stage is meticulously formulated for efficiency and accuracy, surpassing Stable-Diffusion (LDM) performance.
Modality composition not only enhances overall performance but enables emerging proprieties such as consistent editing, interaction capabilities, high-level interpretability, and faster convergence and sampling rate. 
Extensive experiments on diverse datasets, including LSUN-Churches, ImageNet, CelebHQ, and LAION-Art, demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
For instance, {\papernameAbbrev} achieves notable efficiency, matching LDM performance on LSUN-Churches while operating 2$\times$ faster with a 3$\times$ smaller architecture.
The project website is available at:
\href{https://toddlerdiffusion.github.io/website/}{$https://toddlerdiffusion.github.io/website/$}
Generative AI, Diffusion models, Cascaded models, Interpretability, Image Editing
Our approach decomposes the generation process into more straightforward, interpretable stages, for instance, first generating contours, then a palette, and finally, a detailed colored image.