# DiM: Diffusion Mamba for Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14224/

## Key facts

- Cited by 72 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 31 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 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 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [Simplified State Space Layers for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04933/) (2022)
- [All are Worth Words: A ViT Backbone for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12152/) (2022)
- [Hungry Hungry Hippos: Towards Language Modeling with State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14052/) (2022)
- [On the Parameterization and Initialization of Diagonal State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11893/) (2022)
- [VideoMamba: State Space Model for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06977/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Filter Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09673/) (2016)
- [Hunyuan-DiT: A Powerful Multi-Resolution Diffusion Transformer with Fine-Grained Chinese Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08748/) (2024)
- [PaLI-X: On Scaling up a Multilingual Vision and Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18565/) (2023)
- [Lumina-T2X: Transforming Text into Any Modality, Resolution, and Duration via Flow-based Large Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05945/) (2024)
- [How to Train Your HiPPO: State Space Models with Generalized Orthogonal Basis Projections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12037/) (2022)
- [Video Mamba Suite: State Space Model as a Versatile Alternative for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09626/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models Without Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18257/) (2023)
- [Your ViT is Secretly a Hybrid Discriminative-Generative Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07791/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with State Space Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05608/) (2024)
- [Dual-path Mamba: Short and Long-term Bidirectional Selective Structured State Space Models for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18257/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10629/) (2024)
- [Simplifying, Stabilizing and Scaling Continuous-Time Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11081/) (2024)
- [DDT: Decoupled Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05741/) (2025)
- [SANA-Sprint: One-Step Diffusion with Continuous-Time Consistency Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09641/) (2025)
- [Align Your Flow: Scaling Continuous-Time Flow Map Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14603/) (2025)
- [Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02567/) (2025)
- [PixNerd: Pixel Neural Field Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23268/) (2025)
- [Long-Context State-Space Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20171/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03456/) (2024)
- [DeCo: Frequency-Decoupled Pixel Diffusion for End-to-End Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19365/) (2025)
- [DiG: Scalable and Efficient Diffusion Models with Gated Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18428/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Score identity Distillation: Rapidly Surpassing the Teacher in One Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14919/) (2024)
- [TinyFusion: Diffusion Transformers Learned Shallow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01199/) (2024)
- [LinFusion: 1 GPU, 1 Minute, 16K Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02097/) (2024)
- [LinGen: Towards High-Resolution Minute-Length Text-to-Video Generation with Linear Computational Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09856/) (2024)
- [Efficient Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey from Principles to Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11795/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05902/) (2024)
- [SegMAN: Omni-scale Context Modeling with State Space Models and Local Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11890/) (2024)
- [Taming Teacher Forcing for Masked Autoregressive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12389/) (2025)
- [Mamba Policy: Towards Efficient 3D Diffusion Policy with Hybrid Selective State Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07163/) (2024)
- [TREAD: Token Routing for Efficient Architecture-agnostic Diffusion Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04765/) (2025)
- [Mamba in Vision: A Comprehensive Survey of Techniques and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03105/) (2024)
- [FiTv2: Scalable and Improved Flexible Vision Transformer for Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13925/) (2024)
- [MambaCSR: Dual-Interleaved Scanning for Compressed Image Super-Resolution With SSMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11758/) (2024)
- [REDUCIO! Generating 1K Video within 16 Seconds using Extremely Compressed Motion Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13552/) (2024)
- [DiC: Rethinking Conv3x3 Designs in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00603/) (2024)
- [PixelGen: Improving Pixel Diffusion with Perceptual Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02493/) (2026)
- [Exploring Diffusion Transformer Designs via Grafting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05340/) (2025)
- [MTMamba++: Enhancing Multi-Task Dense Scene Understanding via Mamba-Based Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15101/) (2024)
- [LiT: Delving into a Simple Linear Diffusion Transformer for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12976/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have achieved great success in image generation, with the backbone evolving from U-Net to Vision Transformers. However, the computational cost of Transformers is quadratic to the number of tokens, leading to significant challenges when dealing with high-resolution images. In this work, we propose Diffusion Mamba (DiM), which combines the efficiency of Mamba, a sequence model based on State Space Models (SSM), with the expressive power of diffusion models for efficient high-resolution image synthesis. To address the challenge that Mamba cannot generalize to 2D signals, we make several architecture designs including multi-directional scans, learnable padding tokens at the end of each row and column, and lightweight local feature enhancement. Our DiM architecture achieves inference-time efficiency for high-resolution images. In addition, to further improve training efficiency for high-resolution image generation with DiM, we investigate "weak-to-strong" training strategy that pretrains DiM on low-resolution images (256× 256) and then finetune it on high-resolution images (512 × 512). We further explore training-free upsampling strategies to enable the model to generate higher-resolution images (e.g., 1024× 1024 and 1536× 1536) without further fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our DiM. The code of our work is available here: urlhttps://github.com/tyshiwo1/DiM-DiffusionMamba/.