Papers › CADS: Unleashing the Diversity of Diffusion Models through Condition-Annealed Sampling
CADS: Unleashing the Diversity of Diffusion Models through Condition-Annealed Sampling
Seyedmorteza Sadat, Jakob Buhmann, Derek Bradley, Otmar Hilliges, Romann M. Weber
While conditional diffusion models are known to have good coverage of the data distribution, they still face limitations in output diversity, particularly when sampled with a high classifier-free guidance scale for optimal image quality or when trained on small datasets. We attribute this problem to the role of the conditioning signal in inference and offer an improved sampling strategy for diffusion models that can increase generation diversity, especially at high guidance scales, with minimal loss of sample quality. Our sampling strategy anneals the conditioning signal by adding scheduled, monotonically decreasing Gaussian noise to the conditioning vector during inference to balance diversity and condition alignment. Our Condition-Annealed Diffusion Sampler (CADS) can be used with any pretrained model and sampling algorithm, and we show that it boosts the diversity of diffusion models in various conditional generation tasks. Further, using an existing pretrained diffusion model, CADS achieves a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.70 and 2.31 for class-conditional ImageNet generation at 256×256 and 512×512 respectively.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Generation | ImageNet 256x256 | DiT-XL/2 with CADS | FID | 1.70 | #33 of 94 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Generation | ImageNet 512x512 | DiT-XL/2 with CADS | FID | 2.31 | #32 of 52 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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