# DiffSAC: Diffusion-guided Sampling for Consensus-based Robust Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30603 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30603/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 45 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [Point-E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08751/) (2022)
- [VideoCrafter2: Overcoming Data Limitations for High-Quality Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09047/) (2024)
- [Uni-ControlNet: All-in-One Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16322/) (2023)
- [DSAC - Differentiable RANSAC for Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05705/) (2016)
- [SnapFusion: Text-to-Image Diffusion Model on Mobile Devices within Two Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00980/) (2023)
- [Implicit Diffusion Models for Continuous Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16491/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Model-Based Image Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17525/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10647/) (2023)
- [Geometric Transformer for Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06688/) (2022)
- [Learning to Find Good Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05971/) (2017)
- [Learning Two-View Correspondences and Geometry Using Order-Aware Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04964/) (2019)
- [PoseDiffusion: Solving Pose Estimation via Diffusion-aided Bundle Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15667/) (2023)
- [Graph-Cut RANSAC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00984/) (2017)
- [Upscale-A-Video: Temporal-Consistent Diffusion Model for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06640/) (2023)
- [Neural-Guided RANSAC: Learning Where to Sample Model Hypotheses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04132/) (2019)
- [PC2: Projection-Conditioned Point Cloud Diffusion for Single-Image 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10668/) (2023)
- [Event-based Motion Segmentation with Spatio-Temporal Graph Cuts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08730/) (2020)
- [Point Cloud Pre-training with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14960/) (2023)
- [Paragraph-to-Image Generation with Information-Enriched Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14284/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robust estimation is a core computer vision task frequently tackled using sample consensus. However, traditional methods suffer from inefficient sampling as they struggle to identify effective minimum sets before hypothesis evaluation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Diffusion-guided Sampling for Consensus-based Robust Estimation (DiffSAC) framework. DiffSAC introduces a diffusion model to learn the distribution of effective minimum sets. It refines the confidence for each data point, indicating whether it belongs to a good minimum set, rather than ranking the data points as in previous work. This significantly reduces the need to process numerous bad sets. To constrain the refinement direction, geometric features are incorporated as conditions within our diffusion model. Consequently, DiffSAC outputs a small number of high-quality minimum sets, enabling identification of the best hypothesis via consensus evaluation. Notably, compared to previous works requiring evaluating over ten thousand hypotheses, DiffSAC achieves state-of-the-art performance with only dozens, significantly boosting efficiency. Extensive experiments across five classic computer vision tasks demonstrate the superiority of DiffSAC. The diffusion model's sampling accelerators enable real-time operation, and DiffSAC can be used as a plug-and-play module to improve existing sample consensus methods.