Interpolating between Images with Diffusion Models
Authors: name: Clinton J. Wang, name: Polina Golland

One little-explored frontier of image generation and editing is the task of
interpolating between two input images, a feature missing from all currently
deployed image generation pipelines. We argue that such a feature can expand
the creative applications of such models, and propose a method for zero-shot
interpolation using latent diffusion models. We apply interpolation in the
latent space at a sequence of decreasing noise levels, then perform denoising
conditioned on interpolated text embeddings derived from textual inversion and
(optionally) subject poses. For greater consistency, or to specify additional
criteria, we can generate several candidates and use CLIP to select the highest
quality image. We obtain convincing interpolations across diverse subject
poses, image styles, and image content, and show that standard quantitative
metrics such as FID are insufficient to measure the quality of an
interpolation. Code and data are available at
https://clintonjwang.github.io/interpolation.