Deep Equilibrium Approaches to Diffusion Models
Main Conference Track
Authors: Ashwini Pokle, Zhengyang Geng, J. Zico Kolter

Diffusion-based generative models are extremely effective in generating high-quality images, with generated samples often surpassing the quality of those produced by other models under several metrics.  One distinguishing feature of these models, however, is that they typically require long sampling chains in order to produce high-fidelity images.  This presents a challenge not only from the lenses of sampling time, but also from the inherent difficulty in backpropagating through these chains in order to accomplish tasks such as model inversion, i.e., approximately finding latent states that generate known images.  In this paper, we look at diffusion models through a different perspective, that of a (deep) equilibrium (DEQ) fixed point model. Specifically, we extend the recent denoising diffusion implicit model (DDIM), and model the entire sampling chain as a joint, multi-variate fixed point system. This setup provides an elegant unification of diffusion and equilibrium models, and shows benefits in 1) single-shot image sampling, as it replaces the fully-serial typical sampling process with a parallel one; and 2) model inversion, where we can leverage fast gradients in the DEQ setting to much more quickly find the noise that generates a given image.  The approach is also orthogonal and thus complementary to other methods used to reduce the sampling time, or improve model inversion.  We demonstrate our method's strong performance across several datasets, including CIFAR10, CelebA, and LSUN Bedroom and Churches.