# ElasticDiffusion: Training-free Arbitrary Size Image Generation through Global-Local Content Separation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18822 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18822/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 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 49 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2023.

## 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 49)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Posterior Sampling for General Noisy Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14687/) (2022)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)
- [MultiDiffusion: Fusing Diffusion Paths for Controlled Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08113/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [Universal Guidance for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07121/) (2023)
- [Latent Video Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13221/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Lumina-T2X: Transforming Text into Any Modality, Resolution, and Duration via Flow-based Large Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05945/) (2024)
- [UltraPixel: Advancing Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis to New Peaks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02158/) (2024)
- [FouriScale: A Frequency Perspective on Training-Free High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12963/) (2024)
- [Make a Cheap Scaling: A Self-Cascade Diffusion Model for Higher-Resolution Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10491/) (2024)
- [LinFusion: 1 GPU, 1 Minute, 16K Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02097/) (2024)
- [FreeScale: Unleashing the Resolution of Diffusion Models via Tuning-Free Scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09626/) (2024)
- [Taming Data and Transformers for Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19388/) (2024)
- [MegaFusion: Extend Diffusion Models towards Higher-resolution Image Generation without Further Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11001/) (2024)
- [Lossy Compression with Pretrained Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09815/) (2025)
- [Latent Space Super-Resolution for Higher-Resolution Image Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18446/) (2025)
- [ResAdapter: Domain Consistent Resolution Adapter for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02084/) (2024)
- [I-Max: Maximize the Resolution Potential of Pre-trained Rectified Flow Transformers with Projected Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07536/) (2024)
- [Beyond Deepfake Images: Detecting AI-Generated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15955/) (2024)
- [Token-Shuffle: Towards High-Resolution Image Generation with Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17789/) (2025)
- [Is One GPU Enough? Pushing Image Generation at Higher-Resolutions with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07251/) (2024)
- [DyPE: Dynamic Position Extrapolation for Ultra High Resolution Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20766/) (2025)
- [Deepfake Media Generation and Detection in the Generative AI Era: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19537/) (2024)
- [HiStream: Efficient High-Resolution Video Generation via Redundancy-Eliminated Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21338/) (2025)
- [RepLDM: Reprogramming Pretrained Latent Diffusion Models for High-Quality, High-Efficiency, High-Resolution Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06055/) (2024)
- [UltraFlux: Data-Model Co-Design for High-quality Native 4K Text-to-Image Generation across Diverse Aspect Ratios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18050/) (2025)
- [Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis: Data, Method and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01331/) (2025)
- [Parallel Sequence Modeling via Generalized Spatial Propagation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12381/) (2025)
- [SketchFusion: Learning Universal Sketch Features through Fusing Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14129/) (2025)
- [Tortoise and Hare Guidance: Accelerating Diffusion Model Inference with Multirate Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04117/) (2025)
- [AccDiffusion v2: Towards More Accurate Higher-Resolution Diffusion Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02099/) (2024)
- [Creatively Upscaling Images with Global-Regional Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16976/) (2025)
- [Guided and Variance-Corrected Fusion with One-shot Style Alignment for Large-Content Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12771/) (2024)
- [RectifiedHR: Enable Efficient High-Resolution Synthesis via Energy Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02537/) (2025)
- [CineScale: Tuning-Free High-Resolution Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15774/) (2025)
- [InfoScale: Unleashing Training-free Variable-scaled Image Generation via Effective Utilization of Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01421/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have revolutionized image generation in recent years, yet they are still limited to a few sizes and aspect ratios. We propose ElasticDiffusion, a novel training-free decoding method that enables pretrained text-to-image diffusion models to generate images with various sizes. ElasticDiffusion attempts to decouple the generation trajectory of a pretrained model into local and global signals. The local signal controls low-level pixel information and can be estimated on local patches, while the global signal is used to maintain overall structural consistency and is estimated with a reference image. We test our method on CelebA-HQ (faces) and LAION-COCO (objects/indoor/outdoor scenes). Our experiments and qualitative results show superior image coherence quality across aspect ratios compared to MultiDiffusion and the standard decoding strategy of Stable Diffusion. Project page: https://elasticdiffusion.github.io/