# Enhancing Diffusion-Based Quantitatively Controllable Image Generation via Matrix-Form EDM and Adaptive Vicinal Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02114 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02114/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 26 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [The probability flow ODE is provably fast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11798/) (2023)
- [PcDGAN: A Continuous Conditional Diverse Generative Adversarial Network For Inverse Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03620/) (2021)
- [Distilling and Transferring Knowledge via cGAN-generated Samples for Image Classification and Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03164/) (2021)
- [CCDM: Continuous Conditional Diffusion Models for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03546/) (2024)
- [Efficient Subsampling of Realistic Images From GANs Conditional on a Class or a Continuous Variable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11166/) (2021)
- [Point Cloud Generation with Continuous Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08526/) (2022)
- [Turning Waste into Wealth: Leveraging Low-Quality Samples for Enhancing Continuous Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10273/) (2023)
- [Regression-Oriented Knowledge Distillation for Lightweight Ship Orientation Angle Prediction with Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06566/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Continuous Conditional Diffusion Model (CCDM) is a diffusion-based framework designed to generate high-quality images conditioned on continuous regression labels. Although CCDM has demonstrated clear advantages over prior approaches across a range of datasets, it still exhibits notable limitations and has recently been surpassed by a GAN-based method, namely CcGAN-AVAR. These limitations mainly arise from its reliance on an outdated diffusion framework and its low sampling efficiency due to long sampling trajectories. To address these issues, we propose an improved CCDM framework, termed iCCDM, which incorporates the more advanced textitElucidated Diffusion Model (EDM) framework with substantial modifications to improve both generation quality and sampling efficiency. Specifically, iCCDM introduces a novel matrix-form EDM formulation together with an adaptive vicinal training strategy. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, spanning image resolutions from 64×64 to 256×256, demonstrate that iCCDM consistently outperforms existing methods, including state-of-the-art large-scale text-to-image diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion 3, FLUX.1, and Qwen-Image), achieving higher generation quality while significantly reducing sampling cost.
