# SDiT: Spiking Diffusion Model with Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11588 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11588/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 32 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [Surrogate Gradient Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09948/) (2019)
- [All are Worth Words: A ViT Backbone for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12152/) (2022)
- [Deep Residual Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04159/) (2021)
- [Going Deeper With Directly-Trained Larger Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05280/) (2020)
- [Spikformer: When Spiking Neural Network Meets Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15425/) (2022)
- [SpikingJelly: An open-source machine learning infrastructure platform for spike-based intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16620/) (2023)
- [An Attention Free Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14103/) (2021)
- [SpikeGPT: Generative Pre-trained Language Model with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13939/) (2023)
- [Advancing Spiking Neural Networks towards Deep Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08954/) (2021)
- [Deep Directly-Trained Spiking Neural Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11411/) (2023)
- [Fully Spiking Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00375/) (2021)
- [Spiking Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17046/) (2023)
- [Spiking-GAN: A Spiking Generative Adversarial Network Using Time-To-First-Spike Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15420/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Toward Large-scale Spiking Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02111/) (2024)
- [A Survey of RWKV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14847/) (2024)
- [Biologically Inspired Spiking Diffusion Model with Adaptive Lateral Selection Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23767/) (2025)
- [When Geometry Aligns: Dihedral Hidden-State Transformations in UNet, ViT, and DiT Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03580/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have low power consumption and bio-interpretable characteristics, and are considered to have tremendous potential for energy-efficient computing. However, the exploration of SNNs on image generation tasks remains very limited, and a unified and effective structure for SNN-based generative models has yet to be proposed. In this paper, we explore a novel diffusion model architecture within spiking neural networks. We utilize transformer to replace the commonly used U-net structure in mainstream diffusion models. It can generate higher quality images with relatively lower computational cost and shorter sampling time. It aims to provide an empirical baseline for research of generative models based on SNNs. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that our work is highly competitive compared to existing SNN generative models.