Intro to Diffusion Model — Part 6

In this post, we are going to focus on sampling from the reverse process.

4 min readSep 17, 2023

This post is part of a series of posts about diffusion models:

When our model will be fully trained (and even during the training), we will want to reconstruct images using the reverse process. For that, we are going to implement Algorithm 2 from the DDPM paper for sampling from the reverse process and get a new image, which hopefully looks like it comes from the real distribution.

This algorithm describes the reverse process we discussed in parts 2 and 3. We start with a pure standard Gaussian noise, and we gradually denoise it using the prediction of our model. In the end, we get x₀, which should be a clean image from the real distribution. At each step, we try to predict xₜ₋₁ based on the expressions we derivate in parts 2 and 3, such as

Note that the variance we use in the process is known; we don’t need to predict it.

We start by implementing a basic sampling from p

@torch.no_grad()
def sample_p(model, x_t, t, clipping=True):
  """
  Sample from p_θ(xₜ₋₁|xₜ) to get xₜ₋₁ according to Algorithem 2
  """
  betas_t_sampled = sample_by_t(betas_t, t, x_t.shape)
  sqrt_1_minus_alphas_bar_t_sampled = sample_by_t(sqrt_1_minus_alphas_bar_t, t, x_t.shape)
  one_over_sqrt_alphas_t_sampled = sample_by_t(one_over_sqrt_alphas_t, t, x_t.shape)

  if clipping:
    sqrt_alphas_bar_t_sampled = sample_by_t(sqrt_alphas_bar_t, t, x_t.shape)
    sqrt_alphas_bar_t_minus_1_sampled = sample_by_t(sqrt_alphas_bar_t_minus_1, t, x_t.shape)
    alphas_bar_t_sampled = sample_by_t(alphas_bar_t, t, x_t.shape)
    sqrt_alphas_t_sampled = sample_by_t(sqrt_alphas_t, t, x_t.shape)
    alphas_bar_t_minus_1_sampled = sample_by_t(alphas_bar_t_minus_1, t, x_t.shape)

    x0_reconstruct = 1 / sqrt_alphas_bar_t_sampled * (x_t - sqrt_1_minus_alphas_bar_t_sampled * model(x_t, t))
    x0_reconstruct = torch.clip(x0_reconstruct, -1., 1.)
    predicted_mean = (sqrt_alphas_bar_t_minus_1_sampled * betas_t_sampled) / (1 - alphas_bar_t_sampled) * x0_reconstruct + (sqrt_alphas_t_sampled * (1 - alphas_bar_t_minus_1_sampled)) /  (1 - alphas_bar_t_sampled) * x_t

  else:
    predicted_mean = one_over_sqrt_alphas_t_sampled * (x_t - betas_t_sampled / sqrt_1_minus_alphas_bar_t_sampled * model(x_t, t))

  if t[0].item() == 1:
    return predicted_mean
  else:
    posterior_variance_sampled = sample_by_t(posterior_variance, t, x_t.shape)
    noise = torch.randn_like(x_t)
    return predicted_mean + torch.sqrt(posterior_variance_sampled) * noise

The function above is not part of the training, so we wrap it with the torch.no_grad() decorator. Pay attention that there are two modes of implementation here: with and without clipping. The version without the clipping is exactly as in Algorithm 2. However, when we reconstruct x₀, it should be in the range [-1, 1], and that is the reason for the clipping. While the training could perform well without the clipping for simple training datasets, it is better to use the clipping. The expression for the mean in the clipping mode we use is the one we got in part 3:

and the reconstruction of x₀ is followed by the expression from part 3:

Now, we can implement the full Algorithm 2 with a function that lets us sample images from the reverse process.

from tqdm import tqdm
@torch.no_grad()
def sampling(model, shape, image_noise_steps_to_keep=1):
  """
  Implmenting Algorithm 2 - sampling.
  Args:
    model (torch.Module): the model that predictד the noise
    shape (tuple): shape of the data (batch, channels, image_size, image_size)
  Returns:
    (list): list containing the images in the different steps of the reverse process
  """

  batch = shape[0]
  images = torch.randn(shape, device=device)  # pure noise
  images_list = []

  for timestep in tqdm(range(num_timesteps, 0, -1), desc='sampling timestep'):
    images = sample_p(model, images, torch.full((batch,), timestep, device=device, dtype=torch.long))
    if timestep <= image_noise_steps_to_keep:
      images_list.append(images.cpu())
  return images_list

Intro to Diffusion Model — Part 6

In this post, we are going to focus on sampling from the reverse process.

Written by DZ