DiffiT: Diffusion Vision Transformers for Image Generation
Authors: name: Ali Hatamizadeh, name: Jiaming Song, name: Guilin Liu, name: Jan Kautz, name: Arash Vahdat

Diffusion models with their powerful expressivity and high sample quality
have enabled many new applications and use-cases in various domains. For sample
generation, these models rely on a denoising neural network that generates
images by iterative denoising. Yet, the role of denoising network architecture
is not well-studied with most efforts relying on convolutional residual U-Nets.
In this paper, we study the effectiveness of vision transformers in
diffusion-based generative learning. Specifically, we propose a new model,
denoted as Diffusion Vision Transformers (DiffiT), which consists of a hybrid
hierarchical architecture with a U-shaped encoder and decoder. We introduce a
novel time-dependent self-attention module that allows attention layers to
adapt their behavior at different stages of the denoising process in an
efficient manner. We also introduce latent DiffiT which consists of transformer
model with the proposed self-attention layers, for high-resolution image
generation. Our results show that DiffiT is surprisingly effective in
generating high-fidelity images, and it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA)
benchmarks on a variety of class-conditional and unconditional synthesis tasks.
In the latent space, DiffiT achieves a new SOTA FID score of 1.73 on
ImageNet-256 dataset. Repository: https://github.com/NVlabs/DiffiT