# BBDM: Image-to-image Translation with Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.07680 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07680/

## Key facts

- Cited by 225 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 39 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [ILVR: Conditioning Method for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02938/) (2021)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [DualGAN: Unsupervised Dual Learning for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02510/) (2017)
- [DRIT++: Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01270/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01723/) (2019)
- [Unrolled Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02163/) (2016)
- [Conditional Image Generation with Score-Based Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13606/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 225)

- [Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16948/) (2023)
- [HealthGPT: A Medical Large Vision-Language Model for Unifying Comprehension and Generation via Heterogeneous Knowledge Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09838/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Bridge Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15885/) (2024)
- [Image Restoration Through Generalized Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10299/) (2023)
- [Posterior-Mean Rectified Flow: Towards Minimum MSE Photo-Realistic Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00418/) (2024)
- [Region-Adaptive Sampling for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10389/) (2025)
- [UniGS: Unified Representation for Image Generation and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01985/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models Meet Remote Sensing: Principles, Methods, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08926/) (2024)
- [Prior Does Matter: Visual Navigation via Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10041/) (2025)
- [CrossViewDiff: A Cross-View Diffusion Model for Satellite-to-Street View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14765/) (2024)
- [AsyncDiff: Parallelizing Diffusion Models by Asynchronous Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06911/) (2024)
- [iEdit: Localised Text-guided Image Editing with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05947/) (2023)
- [SemFlow: Binding Semantic Segmentation and Image Synthesis via Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20282/) (2024)
- [Frame Interpolation with Consecutive Brownian Bridge Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05953/) (2024)
- [ImageFlowNet: Forecasting Multiscale Image-Level Trajectories of Disease Progression with Irregularly-Sampled Longitudinal Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14794/) (2024)
- [h-Edit: Effective and Flexible Diffusion-Based Editing via Doob's h-Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02187/) (2025)
- [StegoGAN: Leveraging Steganography for Non-Bijective Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20142/) (2024)
- [Deciphering Oracle Bone Language with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00684/) (2024)
- [Learning 3D Gaussians for Extremely Sparse-View Cone-Beam CT Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01090/) (2024)
- [PID: Physics-Informed Diffusion Model for Infrared Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09299/) (2024)
- [Efficient Quantization Strategies for Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05431/) (2023)
- [Slice-Consistent 3D Volumetric Brain CT-to-MRI Translation with 2D Brownian Bridge Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05059/) (2024)
- [C^2RV: Cross-Regional and Cross-View Learning for Sparse-View CBCT Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03902/) (2024)
- [Residual Diffusion Bridge Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23116/) (2025)
- [Inverse Bridge Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01362/) (2025)
- [Audio Super-Resolution with Latent Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17609/) (2025)
- [ThermalGen: Style-Disentangled Flow-Based Generative Models for RGB-to-Thermal Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24878/) (2025)
- [DiffuMatting: Synthesizing Arbitrary Objects with Matting-level Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06168/) (2024)
- [Taming Diffusion Models for Image Restoration: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10353/) (2024)
- [StainDiffuser: MultiTask Dual Diffusion Model for Virtual Staining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11340/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image-to-image translation is an important and challenging problem in computer vision and image processing. Diffusion models (DM) have shown great potentials for high-quality image synthesis, and have gained competitive performance on the task of image-to-image translation. However, most of the existing diffusion models treat image-to-image translation as conditional generation processes, and suffer heavily from the gap between distinct domains. In this paper, a novel image-to-image translation method based on the Brownian Bridge Diffusion Model (BBDM) is proposed, which models image-to-image translation as a stochastic Brownian bridge process, and learns the translation between two domains directly through the bidirectional diffusion process rather than a conditional generation process. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work that proposes Brownian Bridge diffusion process for image-to-image translation. Experimental results on various benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed BBDM model achieves competitive performance through both visual inspection and measurable metrics.