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Common Diffusion Noise Schedules and Sample Steps are Flawed

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arxiv 2305.08891 v4 pith:C5E4ZX6P submitted 2023-05-15 cs.CV

classification cs.CV
keywords diffusionmodelnoiseflawedinferencelasttimestepcommon
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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We discover that common diffusion noise schedules do not enforce the last timestep to have zero signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and some implementations of diffusion samplers do not start from the last timestep. Such designs are flawed and do not reflect the fact that the model is given pure Gaussian noise at inference, creating a discrepancy between training and inference. We show that the flawed design causes real problems in existing implementations. In Stable Diffusion, it severely limits the model to only generate images with medium brightness and prevents it from generating very bright and dark samples. We propose a few simple fixes: (1) rescale the noise schedule to enforce zero terminal SNR; (2) train the model with v prediction; (3) change the sampler to always start from the last timestep; (4) rescale classifier-free guidance to prevent over-exposure. These simple changes ensure the diffusion process is congruent between training and inference and allow the model to generate samples more faithful to the original data distribution.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Learning Sampling Parameters for Diffusion Models

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    An LLM policy trained with GRPO can emit prompt-conditioned, timestep-varying diffusion sampling parameters that beat fixed defaults and prior LLM schedulers on preference metrics.

  2. AutoPartGen: Autogressive 3D Part Generation and Discovery

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    AutoPartGen generates 3D objects as a sequence of latent-space parts, conditioning each new part on previously generated parts, and reports state-of-the-art part completion on PartObjaverse-Tiny.

  3. Efficient Difficulty-Aware Dynamic Routing for Diffusion-Based Real-World Image Super-Resolution

    cs.CV 2026-07 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    DDR-SR routes each real-world low-resolution image to one of two diffusion experts based on a high-frequency-loss difficulty score, using a low-compression VAE for hard images and a high-compression VAE for easy image...

  4. Pinterest Canvas: Large-Scale Image Generation at Pinterest

    cs.CV 2026-03 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A FLUX-style base diffusion model plus task-specific fine-tunes and product-preserving pipelines yields double-digit Pinterest ads engagement lifts and higher no-defect rates than GPT-Image, FLUX Kontext, and Nano Banana.

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