Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in image generation, yet a persistent challenge remains: the bias between model predictions and the target distribution. In this paper, we propose a Bidirectional Noise Injection framework for enhancing diffusion models, implemented via Coordinated Input-Output Perturbation (CIOP). Our approach mitigates this bias by randomly applying synchronized noise injection to both the model inputs and the prediction targets during the training stage. This stochastic, synchronized noise injected acts as a smoothing mechanism that effectively reduces the 2-Wasserstein distance between the predicted and target distributions, as substantiated by our theoretical analysis based on optimal transport theory. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets and various generative tasks demonstrate that our method improves generation quality and training efficiency without incurring additional computational cost. Furthermore, the design of CIOP enables seamless integration with existing diffusion model improvements and advanced frameworks, thereby broadening its applicability. These results highlight the potential of Bidirectional Noise Injection via CIOP to alleviate bias in diffusion-based generative models across a wide range of settings.

Diffusion models have gained significant attention in the field of generative modeling due to their capability to produce high-quality samples. However, recent studies show that applying a uniform treatment to all distributions during the training of diffusion models is sub-optimal. In this paper, we present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the forward process in diffusion models. Our findings indicate that distribution variations are not uniform throughout the diffusion process, with the sharpest changes occurring during the initial stages. Moreover, we observe that the initial distribution converges to a Gaussian distribution at an exponential rate, indicating that different initial distributions rapidly become quite similar during the forward diffusion process. Consequently, employing a uniform timestep sampling strategy does not effectively capture these dynamics, potentially leading to sub-optimal training outcomes for diffusion models. To remedy this, we introduce the Bidirectional Beta-Tuned Diffusion Model (BB-TDM). The BB-TDM leverages the Beta distribution to design the timestep sampling distribution and enhance the separation between different initial distributions during the diffusion process. By selecting appropriate parameters, the BB-TDM ensures that the timestep sampling distribution is aligned with the properties of the forward diffusion process and moderates the convergence speed of different initial distributions. Extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets on different diffusion models confirm the efficacy of the proposed BB-TDM.

Diffusion Models (DMs) have impressive capabilities among generation models, but are limited to slower inference speeds and higher computational costs. Previous works utilize one-shot structure pruning to derive lightweight DMs from pre-trained ones, but this approach often leads to a significant drop in generation quality and may result in the removal of crucial weights. Thus we propose a iterative pruning method based on gradient flow, including the gradient flow pruning process and the gradient flow pruning criterion. We employ a progressive soft pruning strategy to maintain the continuity of the mask matrix and guide it along the gradient flow of the energy function based on the pruning criterion in sparse space, thereby avoiding the sudden information loss typically caused by one-shot pruning. Gradient-flow based criterion prune parameters whose removal increases the gradient norm of loss function and can enable fast convergence for a pruned model in iterative pruning stage. Our extensive experiments on widely used datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in efficiency and consistency with pre-trained models.

While existing face anti-spoofing (FAS) methods have achieved high performance on in-domain datasets, good generalization is crucial for their real-world application. Previous domain generalizable FAS methods have attempted to identify common features of live samples from different domains in the spatial domain, but finding such features is challenging. To address this issue, we propose a solution to the FAS problem in the frequency domain. Specifically, we propose a novel Frequency-domain Augmentation Masked Image Model Framework (FAMIM) for domain generalizable face anti-spoofing. Our approach involves mixing different style information into the input face image in the frequency domain and then reconstructing the original face image. This reconstruction task is designed to make our encoder insensitive to the domain style information of the input face image. Additionally, we design a label fusion module in FAMIM to ensure that the encoder extracts liveness or spoof features in the masked image. Our extensive experiments on four widely used domain generalizable FAS datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Diffusion models have garnered significant success in generative tasks, emerging as the predominant model in this domain. Despite their success, the substantial computational resources required for training diffusion models restrict their practical applications. In this paper, we resort to the optimal transport theory to accelerate the training of diffusion models, providing an in-depth analysis of the forward diffusion process. It shows that the upper bound on the Wasserstein distance of the distribution between any two timesteps in the diffusion process is an exponential decrease of the initial distance by a factor of times. This finding suggests that the state distribution of the diffusion model has a non-uniform rate of change at different points in time, thus highlighting the different importance of the diffusion timestep. To this end, we propose a novel non-uniform timestep sampling method based on the Bernoulli distribution, which favors more frequent sampling in significant timestep intervals. The key idea is to make the model focus on timesteps with larger differences, thus accelerating the training of the diffusion model. Experiments on benchmark datasets reveal that the proposed method significantly reduces the computational overhead while improving the quality of the generated images.

The generalizable face anti-spoofing (FAS) has attracted much attention recently. Even though many existing methods perform well under intra-domain settings, the model’s performance in the unseen domain is not satisfying. In this paper, we shift our attention to the frequency domain to seek a solution. Specifically, we examine the characteristics of different frequency band components of FAS images and observe that the model’s cross-domain performance is very sensitive to low-frequency features. To alleviate this sensitivity and improve the model’s performance in FAS cross-domain tasks, we propose a new approach called Masked Frequency Autoencoders (MFAE). MFAE randomly masks a portion of frequencies on the low-frequency spectrum of the image and then reconstructs the image from the resulting embedding. This innovative Masked Image Modeling (MIM) strategy can be used as a self-supervised task for pre-training vision transformers (ViTs), which can reduce the ViT encoder’s sensitivity to domain shifts. Additionally, we add an auxiliary content-regularization decoder in our MFAE to encourage the encoder to be insensitive to low-frequency features. The results show that the model insensitive to low-frequency features performs well on extensive public datasets and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in cross-domain FAS tasks.