# DAG: Depth-Aware Guidance with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08861 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08861/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 58 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11793/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Probing the 3D Awareness of Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08636/) (2024)
- [Readout Guidance: Learning Control from Diffusion Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02150/) (2023)
- [Beyond Surface Statistics: Scene Representations in a Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05720/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Model for Dense Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19094/) (2023)
- [IFAdapter: Instance Feature Control for Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08240/) (2024)
- [A Simple Approach to Unifying Diffusion-based Conditional Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11439/) (2024)
- [Dual-Process Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01955/) (2025)
- [ORIGEN: Zero-Shot 3D Orientation Grounding in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22194/) (2025)
- [Diffscaler: Enhancing the Generative Prowess of Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09976/) (2024)
- [RGB-D-Fusion: Image Conditioned Depth Diffusion of Humanoid Subjects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15988/) (2023)
- [Incorporating Inductive Biases to Energy-based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01111/) (2025)
- [DepthArb: Training-Free Depth-Arbitrated Generation for Occlusion-Robust Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23924/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative models have recently undergone significant advancement due to the diffusion models. The success of these models can be often attributed to their use of guidance techniques, such as classifier or classifier-free guidance, which provide effective mechanisms to trade-off between fidelity and diversity. However, these methods are not capable of guiding a generated image to be aware of its geometric configuration, e.g., depth, which hinders their application to areas that require a certain level of depth awareness. To address this limitation, we propose a novel guidance method for diffusion models that uses estimated depth information derived from the rich intermediate representations of diffusion models. We first present label-efficient depth estimation framework using internal representations of diffusion models. Subsequently, we propose the incorporation of two guidance techniques based on pseudo-labeling and depth-domain diffusion prior during the sampling phase to self-condition the generated image using the estimated depth map. Experiments and comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in guiding the diffusion models towards the generation of geometrically plausible images.