# ZigMa: A DiT-style Zigzag Mamba Diffusion Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13802 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13802/

## Key facts

- Cited by 84 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 96 of its 120 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)
- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Video, motion and generative Mamba models](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/video-motion-and-generative-mamba-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 96)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 84)

- [Demystify Mamba in Vision: A Linear Attention Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16605/) (2024)
- [Scaling Diffusion Transformers to 16 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11633/) (2024)
- [State Space Model for New-Generation Network Alternative to Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09516/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models and Representation Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00783/) (2024)
- [Hamba: Single-view 3D Hand Reconstruction with Graph-guided Bi-Scanning Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09646/) (2024)
- [MaIR: A Locality- and Continuity-Preserving Mamba for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20066/) (2024)
- [LinFusion: 1 GPU, 1 Minute, 16K Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02097/) (2024)
- [Efficient Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey from Principles to Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11795/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01129/) (2024)
- [FlexVAR: Flexible Visual Autoregressive Modeling without Residual Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20313/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Pretraining with Mamba in Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07537/) (2024)
- [TREAD: Token Routing for Efficient Architecture-agnostic Diffusion Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04765/) (2025)
- [SSUMamba: Spatial-Spectral Selective State Space Model for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01726/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Mamba Architectures for Medical Image Analysis: Classification, Segmentation, Restoration and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02362/) (2024)
- [MaskFlow: Discrete Flows For Flexible and Efficient Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11234/) (2025)
- [OmniMamba: Efficient and Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation via State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08686/) (2025)
- [M4V: Multimodal Mamba for Efficient Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10915/) (2025)
- [DiMSUM: Diffusion Mamba -- A Scalable and Unified Spatial-Frequency Method for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04168/) (2024)
- [[MASK] is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06787/) (2024)
- [LiT: Delving into a Simple Linear Diffusion Transformer for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12976/) (2025)
- [Learning Phase Distortion with Selective State Space Models for Video Turbulence Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02697/) (2025)
- [EDiT: Efficient Diffusion Transformers with Linear Compressed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16726/) (2025)
- [Retinex-RAWMamba: Bridging Demosaicing and Denoising for Low-Light RAW Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07040/) (2024)
- [TransMamba: Fast Universal Architecture Adaption from Transformers to Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15130/) (2025)
- [VasTSD: Learning 3D Vascular Tree-state Space Diffusion Model for Angiography Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12758/) (2025)
- [MODEM: A Morton-Order Degradation Estimation Mechanism for Adverse Weather Image Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17581/) (2025)
- [DiffuMamba: High-Throughput Diffusion LMs with Mamba Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15927/) (2025)
- [Faster Vision Mamba is Rebuilt in Minutes via Merged Token Re-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12496/) (2024)
- [OuroMamba: A Data-Free Quantization Framework for Vision Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10959/) (2025)
- [SaMam: Style-aware State Space Model for Arbitrary Image Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15934/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The diffusion model has long been plagued by scalability and quadratic complexity issues, especially within transformer-based structures. In this study, we aim to leverage the long sequence modeling capability of a State-Space Model called Mamba to extend its applicability to visual data generation. Firstly, we identify a critical oversight in most current Mamba-based vision methods, namely the lack of consideration for spatial continuity in the scan scheme of Mamba. Secondly, building upon this insight, we introduce a simple, plug-and-play, zero-parameter method named Zigzag Mamba, which outperforms Mamba-based baselines and demonstrates improved speed and memory utilization compared to transformer-based baselines. Lastly, we integrate Zigzag Mamba with the Stochastic Interpolant framework to investigate the scalability of the model on large-resolution visual datasets, such as FacesHQ 1024× 1024 and UCF101, MultiModal-CelebA-HQ, and MS COCO 256× 256 . Code will be released at https://taohu.me/zigma/