Papers › Continual Learning of Diffusion Models with Generative Distillation

Continual Learning of Diffusion Models with Generative Distillation

23 Nov 2023arXiv:2311.14028archive 2025-07-28

Sergi Masip, Pau Rodriguez, Tinne Tuytelaars, Gido M. van de Ven

Diffusion models are powerful generative models that achieve state-of-the-art performance in image synthesis. However, training them demands substantial amounts of data and computational resources. Continual learning would allow for incrementally learning new tasks and accumulating knowledge, thus enabling the reuse of trained models for further learning. One potentially suitable continual learning approach is generative replay, where a copy of a generative model trained on previous tasks produces synthetic data that are interleaved with data from the current task. However, standard generative replay applied to diffusion models results in a catastrophic loss in denoising capabilities. In this paper, we propose generative distillation, an approach that distils the entire reverse process of a diffusion model. We demonstrate that our approach substantially improves the continual learning performance of generative replay with only a modest increase in the computational costs.

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atenrev/diffusion_continual_learning officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
atenrev/difussion_continual_learning officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Continual LearningDenoisingImage Generation

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Diffusion

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