# AsyncPatch Diffusion: spatially-flexible image generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07079 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07079/

## 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 41 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [Generative Flows on Discrete State-Spaces: Enabling Multimodal Flows with Applications to Protein Co-Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04997/) (2024)
- [MM-Diffusion: Learning Multi-Modal Diffusion Models for Joint Audio and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09478/) (2022)
- [One Transformer Fits All Distributions in Multi-Modal Diffusion at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06555/) (2023)
- [A Variational Perspective on Diffusion-Based Generative Models and Score Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02808/) (2021)
- [AR-Diffusion: Auto-Regressive Diffusion Model for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09515/) (2023)
- [Rolling Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09470/) (2024)
- [Energy-Based Diffusion Language Models for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21357/) (2024)
- [Generator Matching: Generative modeling with arbitrary Markov processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20587/) (2024)
- [HD-Painter: High-Resolution and Prompt-Faithful Text-Guided Image Inpainting with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14091/) (2023)
- [Unified Multimodal Discrete Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20853/) (2025)
- [Large-Scale Text-to-Image Model with Inpainting is a Zero-Shot Subject-Driven Image Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15466/) (2024)
- [OmniFlow: Any-to-Any Generation with Multi-Modal Rectified Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01169/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Standard diffusion models corrupt an entire sample with a single shared noise level, forcing all spatial regions to follow the same denoising trajectory. We introduce AsyncPatch Diffusion, a joint-diffusion framework that assigns distinct noise levels to different input dimensions, such as image pixels, or latent tokens. We show how this asynchronous corruption defines a valid generative process while supporting a richer family of spatially heterogeneous denoising trajectories, and prove the first valid ELBO for this process. We show that a single pretrained model can perform spatially adaptive generation, where different regions are denoised on different schedules. A key challenge is training: naive independent noise-level sampling overemphasizes highly heterogeneous configurations and underrepresents homogeneous noise levels, that are crucial during sampling. We address this with a controlled noise-level sampler that regulates both the average corruption level and its spatial variability. AsyncPatch achieves generation quality comparable to conventional diffusion on ImageNet 256 and LSUN, while being natively suited for inpainting without task-specific fine-tuning. We further introduce input guidance, which uses clean or partially corrupted regions to guide the generation of unknown regions, improving local consistency and texture matching. Finally, we demonstrate adaptive generation strategies including uncertainty-guided acceleration and autoregressive sampling.