Heat Diffusion Models -- Interpixel Attention Mechanism

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) process images as a whole. Since adjacent pixels are highly likely to belong to the same object, we propose the Heat Diffusion Model (HDM) to further preserve image details and generate more realistic images. HDM essentially is a DDPM that incorporates an attention mechanism between pixels. In HDM, the discrete form of the two-dimensional heat equation is integrated into the diffusion and generation formulas of DDPM, enabling the model to compute relationships between neighboring pixels during image processing. Our experiments demonstrate that HDM can generate higher-quality samples compared to models such as DDPM, Consistency Diffusion Models (CDM), Latent Diffusion Models (LDM), and Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Networks (VQGAN).