# SyncSDE: A Probabilistic Framework for Diffusion Synchronization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21555/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 47 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 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 47)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [MasaCtrl: Tuning-Free Mutual Self-Attention Control for Consistent Image Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08465/) (2023)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [MultiDiffusion: Fusing Diffusion Paths for Controlled Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08113/) (2023)
- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (2022)
- [TEXTure: Text-Guided Texturing of 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01721/) (2023)
- [Text2Tex: Text-driven Texture Synthesis via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11396/) (2023)
- [Dual Diffusion Implicit Bridges for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08382/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Refracting Reality: Generating Images with Realistic Transparent Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17340/) (2025)
- [Variational Test-time Optimization for Diffusion Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15614/) (2026)
- [Accelerated Likelihood Maximization for Diffusion-based Versatile Content Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31323/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There have been many attempts to leverage multiple diffusion models for collaborative generation, extending beyond the original domain. A prominent approach involves synchronizing multiple diffusion trajectories by mixing the estimated scores to artificially correlate the generation processes. However, existing methods rely on naive heuristics, such as averaging, without considering task specificity. These approaches do not clarify why such methods work and often produce suboptimal results when a heuristic suitable for one task is blindly applied to others. In this paper, we present a probabilistic framework for analyzing why diffusion synchronization works and reveal where heuristics should be focused; modeling correlations between multiple trajectories and adapting them to each specific task. We further identify optimal correlation models per task, achieving better results than previous approaches that apply a single heuristic across all tasks without justification.