# Pyramidal Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.01864 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01864/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 39 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion foundations and sampling](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-foundations-and-sampling/)

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [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)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [Pseudo Numerical Methods for Diffusion Models on Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09778/) (2022)
- [Score-based Generative Modeling in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05931/) (2021)
- [ILVR: Conditioning Method for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02938/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Generative Diffusion Prior for Unified Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01247/) (2023)
- [SINE: SINgle Image Editing with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04489/) (2022)
- [DiffCollage: Parallel Generation of Large Content with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17076/) (2023)
- [Soft Diffusion: Score Matching for General Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05442/) (2022)
- [Global Structure-Aware Diffusion Process for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17577/) (2023)
- [Matryoshka Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15111/) (2023)
- [Efficient Diffusion Models for Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09292/) (2022)
- [Improving Diffusion Models for Scene Text Editing with Dual Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05568/) (2023)
- [f-DM: A Multi-stage Diffusion Model via Progressive Signal Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04955/) (2022)
- [A Closer Look at Time Steps is Worthy of Triple Speed-Up for Diffusion Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17403/) (2024)
- [Arbitrary-Scale Image Generation and Upsampling using Latent Diffusion Model and Implicit Neural Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10255/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Model for Dense Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19094/) (2023)
- [Fast Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06991/) (2023)
- [MonoDiffusion: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation Using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07198/) (2023)
- [Dimensionality-Varying Diffusion Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16032/) (2022)
- [NAMI: Efficient Image Generation via Bridged Progressive Rectified Flow Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09242/) (2025)
- [Flow Along the K-Amplitude for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19353/) (2025)
- [Graph Harmony: Denoising and Nuclear-Norm Wasserstein Adaptation for Enhanced Domain Transfer in Graph-Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12361/) (2023)
- [Super-resolution Reconstruction of Single Image for Latent features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12845/) (2022)
- [RectifiedHR: Enable Efficient High-Resolution Synthesis via Energy Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02537/) (2025)
- [Disentanglement in T-space for Faster and Distributed Training of Diffusion Models with Fewer Latent-states](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14413/) (2025)
- [Constrained Flow Matching via Lagrangian Dual Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04513/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, diffusion model have demonstrated impressive image generation performances, and have been extensively studied in various computer vision tasks. Unfortunately, training and evaluating diffusion models consume a lot of time and computational resources. To address this problem, here we present a novel pyramidal diffusion model that can generate high resolution images starting from much coarser resolution images using a em single score function trained with a positional embedding. This enables a neural network to be much lighter and also enables time-efficient image generation without compromising its performances. Furthermore, we show that the proposed approach can be also efficiently used for multi-scale super-resolution problem using a single score function.