# Diffusion-4K: Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18352 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18352/

## Key facts

- Cited by 65 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 38 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [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)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02054/) (2019)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15571/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17042/) (2023)
- [SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08740/) (2024)
- [MultiDiffusion: Fusing Diffusion Paths for Controlled Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08113/) (2023)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [ZeRO-Offload: Democratizing Billion-Scale Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06840/) (2021)
- [SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10629/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [HiFlow: Training-free High-Resolution Image Generation with Flow-Aligned Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06232/) (2025)
- [UltraHR-100K: Enhancing UHR Image Synthesis with A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20661/) (2025)
- [Stage-wise Dynamics of Classifier-Free Guidance in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22007/) (2025)
- [DyPE: Dynamic Position Extrapolation for Ultra High Resolution Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20766/) (2025)
- [UltraImage: Rethinking Resolution Extrapolation in Image Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04504/) (2025)
- [SANA-Streaming: Real-time Streaming Video Editing with Hybrid Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30409/) (2026)
- [Toward Diffusible High-Dimensional Latent Spaces: A Frequency Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22249/) (2025)
- [L2P: Unlocking Latent Potential for Pixel Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12013/) (2026)
- [DC-Gen: Post-Training Diffusion Acceleration with Deeply Compressed Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25180/) (2025)
- [AutoMV: An Automatic Multi-Agent System for Music Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12196/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Text-to-Image Diffusion Transformer via Split-Text Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19261/) (2025)
- [Latent Wavelet Diffusion For Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00433/) (2025)
- [Decoupling High and Low Frequencies for Faithful Image Generation with Fine Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05441/) (2025)
- [UltraFlux: Data-Model Co-Design for High-quality Native 4K Text-to-Image Generation across Diverse Aspect Ratios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18050/) (2025)
- [DA-VAE: Plug-in Latent Compression for Diffusion via Detail Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22125/) (2026)
- [Jodi: Unification of Visual Generation and Understanding via Joint Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19084/) (2025)
- [Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis: Data, Method and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01331/) (2025)
- [FlowLet: Conditional 3D Brain MRI Synthesis using Wavelet Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05212/) (2026)
- [Nucleus-Image: Sparse MoE for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12163/) (2026)
- [RAID: A Dataset for Testing the Adversarial Robustness of AI-Generated Image Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03988/) (2025)
- [TP-Blend: Textual-Prompt Attention Pairing for Precise Object-Style Blending in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08011/) (2026)
- [Foveated Diffusion: Efficient Spatially Adaptive Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23491/) (2026)
- [Asymmetric VAE for One-Step Video Super-Resolution Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24142/) (2025)
- [UltraImageGen: Efficient Ultra-High-Resolution Image Generation with Hierarchical Local Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16325/) (2025)
- [Transform Trained Transformer for Accelerating Native 4K Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13492/) (2025)
- [SEGA: Spectral-Energy Guided Attention for Resolution Extrapolation in Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22668/) (2026)
- [Cert-LAS: Toward Certified Model Ownership Verification for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Layer-Adaptive Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29809/) (2026)
- [Phase-Aligned RoPE for Mixed-Resolution Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19778/) (2025)
- [Low-Resolution Editing is All You Need for High-Resolution Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19945/) (2025)
- [Spectral and Trajectory Regularization for Diffusion Transformer Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06275/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present Diffusion-4K, a novel framework for direct ultra-high-resolution image synthesis using text-to-image diffusion models. The core advancements include: (1) Aesthetic-4K Benchmark: addressing the absence of a publicly available 4K image synthesis dataset, we construct Aesthetic-4K, a comprehensive benchmark for ultra-high-resolution image generation. We curated a high-quality 4K dataset with carefully selected images and captions generated by GPT-4o. Additionally, we introduce GLCM Score and Compression Ratio metrics to evaluate fine details, combined with holistic measures such as FID, Aesthetics and CLIPScore for a comprehensive assessment of ultra-high-resolution images. (2) Wavelet-based Fine-tuning: we propose a wavelet-based fine-tuning approach for direct training with photorealistic 4K images, applicable to various latent diffusion models, demonstrating its effectiveness in synthesizing highly detailed 4K images. Consequently, Diffusion-4K achieves impressive performance in high-quality image synthesis and text prompt adherence, especially when powered by modern large-scale diffusion models (e.g., SD3-2B and Flux-12B). Extensive experimental results from our benchmark demonstrate the superiority of Diffusion-4K in ultra-high-resolution image synthesis.