Smooth Diffusion: Crafting Smooth Latent Spaces in Diffusion Models
Authors: Jiayi Guo, Xingqian Xu, Yifan Pu, Zanlin Ni, Chaofei Wang, Manushree Vasu, Shiji Song, Gao Huang, Humphrey Shi

Recently diffusion models have made remarkable progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation synthesizing images with high fidelity and diverse contents. Despite this advancement latent space smoothness within diffusion models remains largely unexplored. Smooth latent spaces ensure that a perturbation on an input latent corresponds to a steady change in the output image. This property proves beneficial in downstream tasks including image interpolation inversion and editing. In this work we expose the non-smoothness of diffusion latent spaces by observing noticeable visual fluctuations resulting from minor latent variations. To tackle this issue we propose Smooth Diffusion a new category of diffusion models that can be simultaneously high-performing and smooth. Specifically we introduce Step-wise Variation Regularization to enforce the proportion between the variations of an arbitrary input latent and that of the output image is a constant at any diffusion training step. In addition we devise an interpolation standard deviation (ISTD) metric to effectively assess the latent space smoothness of a diffusion model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Smooth Diffusion stands out as a more desirable solution not only in T2I generation but also across various downstream tasks. Smooth Diffusion is implemented as a plug-and-play Smooth-LoRA to work with various community models. Code is available at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Smooth-Diffusion.