# DiffInfinite: Large Mask-Image Synthesis via Parallel Random Patch Diffusion in Histopathology

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13384 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13384/

## Key facts

- Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 61 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13188/) (2023)
- [The Future of Digital Health with Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08119/) (2020)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Art or Digital Forgery? Investigating Data Replication in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03860/) (2022)
- [Rotation Equivariant CNNs for Digital Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03962/) (2018)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to Gigapixel Images via Hierarchical Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02647/) (2022)
- [The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17493/) (2023)
- [A Note on the Inception Score](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01973/) (2018)
- [Large Scale Image Completion via Co-Modulated Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10428/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Learned representation-guided diffusion models for large-image generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07330/) (2023)
- [ZoomLDM: Latent Diffusion Model for multi-scale image generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16969/) (2024)
- [TopoCellGen: Generating Histopathology Cell Topology with a Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06011/) (2024)
- [Is One GPU Enough? Pushing Image Generation at Higher-Resolutions with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07251/) (2024)
- [Generative Fractional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17638/) (2023)
- [Analyzing Tumors by Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06035/) (2024)
- [PixCell: A generative foundation model for digital histopathology images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05127/) (2025)
- [PathDiff: Histopathology Image Synthesis with Unpaired Text and Mask Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23440/) (2025)
- [VM-DDPM: Vision Mamba Diffusion for Medical Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05667/) (2024)
- [MeDi: Metadata-Guided Diffusion Models for Mitigating Biases in Tumor Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17140/) (2025)
- [Content Generation Models in Computational Pathology: A Comprehensive Survey on Methods, Applications, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10993/) (2025)
- [Multimodal LLM-Guided Semantic Correction in Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20053/) (2025)
- [Semantic and Visual Crop-Guided Diffusion Models for Heterogeneous Tissue Synthesis in Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17847/) (2025)
- [Latent Diffusion Models with Image-Derived Annotations for Enhanced AI-Assisted Cancer Diagnosis in Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09792/) (2023)
- [PathoPainter: Augmenting Histopathology Segmentation via Tumor-aware Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04634/) (2025)
- [Fractional Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01795/) (2025)
- [Mask-guided cross-image attention for zero-shot in-silico histopathologic image generation with a diffusion model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11664/) (2024)
- [Synthetic Generation of Dermatoscopic Images with GAN and Closed-Form Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05114/) (2024)
- [Physics-informed DeepCT: Sinogram Wavelet Decomposition Meets Masked Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09935/) (2025)
- [NDM: A Noise-driven Detection and Mitigation Framework against Implicit Sexual Intentions in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15752/) (2025)
- [Patch-to-Global: Random Patch Diffusion for Globally Consistent Megapixel Artifact Inpainting in Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24116/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Utility of Memory Efficient Medical Image Generation: A Study on Lung Nodule Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12542/) (2024)
- [StructDiff: Structure-aware Diffusion Model for 3D Fine-grained Medical Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09560/) (2025)
- [MSDM: Generating Task-Specific Pathology Images with a Multimodal Conditioned Diffusion Model for Cell and Nuclei Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09121/) (2025)
- [Disentangled Anatomy-Disease Diffusion (DADD) for Controllable Ulcerative Colitis Progression Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01848/) (2026)
- [PathAR: Structure-First Autoregressive Synthesis of Multimodal Pathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01543/) (2026)
- [UniNDM: A Unified Noise-driven Detection and Mitigation Framework Against Sexual Content in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16828/) (2026)
- [P-PatchDiff: Progressive Patch Diffusion Models for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01123/) (2026)
- [BigCell: Generating Gigapixel Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14261/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present DiffInfinite, a hierarchical diffusion model that generates arbitrarily large histological images while preserving long-range correlation structural information. Our approach first generates synthetic segmentation masks, subsequently used as conditions for the high-fidelity generative diffusion process. The proposed sampling method can be scaled up to any desired image size while only requiring small patches for fast training. Moreover, it can be parallelized more efficiently than previous large-content generation methods while avoiding tiling artifacts. The training leverages classifier-free guidance to augment a small, sparsely annotated dataset with unlabelled data. Our method alleviates unique challenges in histopathological imaging practice: large-scale information, costly manual annotation, and protective data handling. The biological plausibility of DiffInfinite data is evaluated in a survey by ten experienced pathologists as well as a downstream classification and segmentation task. Samples from the model score strongly on anti-copying metrics which is relevant for the protection of patient data.