Marigold: Affordable Adaptation of Diffusion-Based Image Generators for
  Image Analysis
Authors: name: Bingxin Ke; name: Kevin Qu; name: Tianfu Wang; name: Nando Metzger; name: Shengyu Huang; name: Bo Li; name: Anton Obukhov; name: Konrad Schindler
Published: 2025-05-14 13:07:03

Abstract: The success of deep learning in computer vision over the past decade has
hinged on large labeled datasets and strong pretrained models. In data-scarce
settings, the quality of these pretrained models becomes crucial for effective
transfer learning. Image classification and self-supervised learning have
traditionally been the primary methods for pretraining CNNs and
transformer-based architectures. Recently, the rise of text-to-image generative
models, particularly those using denoising diffusion in a latent space, has
introduced a new class of foundational models trained on massive, captioned
image datasets. These models' ability to generate realistic images of unseen
content suggests they possess a deep understanding of the visual world. In this
work, we present Marigold, a family of conditional generative models and a
fine-tuning protocol that extracts the knowledge from pretrained latent
diffusion models like Stable Diffusion and adapts them for dense image analysis
tasks, including monocular depth estimation, surface normals prediction, and
intrinsic decomposition. Marigold requires minimal modification of the
pre-trained latent diffusion model's architecture, trains with small synthetic
datasets on a single GPU over a few days, and demonstrates state-of-the-art
zero-shot generalization. Project page:
https://marigoldcomputervision.github.io