# Merging and Splitting Diffusion Paths for Semantically Coherent Panoramas

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15660/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 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 54 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 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, 30 of 54)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (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)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [DynamicScaler: Seamless and Scalable Video Generation for Panoramic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11100/) (2024)
- [Latent Swap Joint Diffusion for 2D Long-Form Latent Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05130/) (2025)
- [PanoLlama: Generating Endless and Coherent Panoramas with Next-Token-Prediction LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15867/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Styled Text Image Generation, but Make it Reliable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23240/) (2025)
- [Zoomed In, Diffused Out: Towards Local Degradation-Aware Multi-Diffusion for Extreme Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12072/) (2024)
- [Quo Vadis Handwritten Text Generation for Handwritten Text Recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09936/) (2025)
- [Shifting the Breaking Point of Flow Matching for Multi-Instance Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08749/) (2026)
- [JoLT: Joint Latent Trajectories for Context-Guided High-Resolution Tiled Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15395/) (2026)
- [EditCrafter: Tuning-free High-Resolution Image Editing via Pretrained Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10268/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have become the State-of-the-Art for text-to-image generation, and increasing research effort has been dedicated to adapting the inference process of pretrained diffusion models to achieve zero-shot capabilities. An example is the generation of panorama images, which has been tackled in recent works by combining independent diffusion paths over overlapping latent features, which is referred to as joint diffusion, obtaining perceptually aligned panoramas. However, these methods often yield semantically incoherent outputs and trade-off diversity for uniformity. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Merge-Attend-Diffuse operator, which can be plugged into different types of pretrained diffusion models used in a joint diffusion setting to improve the perceptual and semantical coherence of the generated panorama images. Specifically, we merge the diffusion paths, reprogramming self- and cross-attention to operate on the aggregated latent space. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experimental analysis, together with a user study, demonstrate that our method maintains compatibility with the input prompt and visual quality of the generated images while increasing their semantic coherence. We release the code at https://github.com/aimagelab/MAD.