GenTron: Delving Deep into Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video
  Generation
Authors: name: Shoufa Chen, name: Mengmeng Xu, name: Jiawei Ren, name: Yuren Cong, name: Sen He, name: Yanping Xie, name: Animesh Sinha, name: Ping Luo, name: Tao Xiang, name: Juan-Manuel Perez-Rua

In this study, we explore Transformer-based diffusion models for image and
video generation. Despite the dominance of Transformer architectures in various
fields due to their flexibility and scalability, the visual generative domain
primarily utilizes CNN-based U-Net architectures, particularly in
diffusion-based models. We introduce GenTron, a family of Generative models
employing Transformer-based diffusion, to address this gap. Our initial step
was to adapt Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) from class to text conditioning, a
process involving thorough empirical exploration of the conditioning mechanism.
We then scale GenTron from approximately 900M to over 3B parameters, observing
significant improvements in visual quality. Furthermore, we extend GenTron to
text-to-video generation, incorporating novel motion-free guidance to enhance
video quality. In human evaluations against SDXL, GenTron achieves a 51.1% win
rate in visual quality (with a 19.8% draw rate), and a 42.3% win rate in text
alignment (with a 42.9% draw rate). GenTron also excels in the T2I-CompBench,
underscoring its strengths in compositional generation. We believe this work
will provide meaningful insights and serve as a valuable reference for future
research.