# DreamSampler: Unifying Diffusion Sampling and Score Distillation for Image Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.11415 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11415/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 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 23 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2024.

## 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, 23 of 23)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [SyncDreamer: Generating Multiview-consistent Images from a Single-view Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03453/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (2023)
- [I2SB: Image-to-Image Schr"odinger Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05872/) (2023)
- [Solving Linear Inverse Problems Provably via Posterior Sampling with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00619/) (2023)
- [Delta Denoising Score](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07090/) (2023)
- [VectorFusion: Text-to-SVG by Abstracting Pixel-Based Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11319/) (2022)
- [Towards Layer-wise Image Vectorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04655/) (2022)
- [Posterior Distillation Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13831/) (2023)
- [Regularization by Texts for Latent Diffusion Inverse Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15658/) (2023)
- [Energy-Based Cross Attention for Bayesian Context Update in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09869/) (2023)

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

- [FlowEdit: Inversion-Free Text-Based Editing Using Pre-Trained Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08629/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00083/) (2024)
- [CFG++: Manifold-constrained Classifier Free Guidance for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08070/) (2024)
- [FlowDPS: Flow-Driven Posterior Sampling for Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08136/) (2025)
- [VistaDream: Sampling multiview consistent images for single-view scene reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16892/) (2024)
- [FlowAlign: Trajectory-Regularized, Inversion-Free Flow-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23145/) (2025)
- [Optical-Flow Guided Prompt Optimization for Coherent Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15540/) (2024)
- [NeuralSVG: An Implicit Representation for Text-to-Vector Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03992/) (2025)
- [Repulsive Latent Score Distillation for Solving Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16683/) (2024)
- [DreamCatalyst: Fast and High-Quality 3D Editing via Controlling Editability and Identity Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11394/) (2024)
- [FDS: Frequency-Aware Denoising Score for Text-Guided Latent Diffusion Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19191/) (2025)
- [StochSync: Stochastic Diffusion Synchronization for Image Generation in Arbitrary Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15445/) (2025)
- [VideoGuide: Improving Video Diffusion Models without Training Through a Teacher's Guide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04364/) (2024)
- [InverseCrafter: Efficient Video ReCapture as a Latent Domain Inverse Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05672/) (2025)
- [Inference-Time Diffusion Model Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08871/) (2024)
- [EquiReg: Equivariance Regularized Diffusion for Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22973/) (2025)
- [Text-to-3D Generation using Jensen-Shannon Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10660/) (2025)
- [Preference Score Distillation: Leveraging 2D Rewards to Align Text-to-3D Generation with Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01594/) (2026)
- [LUSD: Localized Update Score Distillation for Text-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11054/) (2025)
- [ContrastiveCFG: Guiding Diffusion Sampling by Contrasting Positive and Negative Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17077/) (2024)
- [ART-VITON: Measurement-Guided Latent Diffusion for Artifact-Free Virtual Try-On](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25749/) (2025)
- [SyncEdit: Rethinking Lip Synchronization as Editing with Audio-Driven Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09084/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reverse sampling and score-distillation have emerged as main workhorses in recent years for image manipulation using latent diffusion models (LDMs). While reverse diffusion sampling often requires adjustments of LDM architecture or feature engineering, score distillation offers a simple yet powerful model-agnostic approach, but it is often prone to mode-collapsing. To address these limitations and leverage the strengths of both approaches, here we introduce a novel framework called em DreamSampler, which seamlessly integrates these two distinct approaches through the lens of regularized latent optimization. Similar to score-distillation, DreamSampler is a model-agnostic approach applicable to any LDM architecture, but it allows both distillation and reverse sampling with additional guidance for image editing and reconstruction. Through experiments involving image editing, SVG reconstruction and etc, we demonstrate the competitive performance of DreamSampler compared to existing approaches, while providing new applications. Code: https://github.com/DreamSampler/dream-sampler