Papers › MDTv2: Masked Diffusion Transformer is a Strong Image Synthesizer

MDTv2: Masked Diffusion Transformer is a Strong Image Synthesizer

25 Mar 2023ICCV 2023 1arXiv:2303.14389archive 2025-07-28

ShangHua Gao, Pan Zhou, Ming-Ming Cheng, Shuicheng Yan

Despite its success in image synthesis, we observe that diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) often lack contextual reasoning ability to learn the relations among object parts in an image, leading to a slow learning process. To solve this issue, we propose a Masked Diffusion Transformer (MDT) that introduces a mask latent modeling scheme to explicitly enhance the DPMs' ability to contextual relation learning among object semantic parts in an image. During training, MDT operates in the latent space to mask certain tokens. Then, an asymmetric diffusion transformer is designed to predict masked tokens from unmasked ones while maintaining the diffusion generation process. Our MDT can reconstruct the full information of an image from its incomplete contextual input, thus enabling it to learn the associated relations among image tokens. We further improve MDT with a more efficient macro network structure and training strategy, named MDTv2. Experimental results show that MDTv2 achieves superior image synthesis performance, e.g., a new SOTA FID score of 1.58 on the ImageNet dataset, and has more than 10x faster learning speed than the previous SOTA DiT. The source code is released at https://github.com/sail-sg/MDT.

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Attention sail-sg/MDT/masked_diffusion/models.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 07d39f4cc0b2a473 · report
FinalLayer sail-sg/MDT/masked_diffusion/models.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b6005b513a46b17e · report
LabelEmbedder sail-sg/MDT/masked_diffusion/models.py official repository ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e10926ae02924e62 · report
RelativePositionBias sail-sg/MDT/masked_diffusion/models.py official repository ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic Apache-2.0 (permissive) · f1228667bd65606d · report
MDTBlock sail-sg/MDT/masked_diffusion/models.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 56d0dbde01f5df9a · report
MDTv2 sail-sg/MDT/masked_diffusion/models.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 90de145f5347518d · report

Tasks

Image Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Generation ImageNet 256x256 MDTv2 FID 1.58 #27 of 94 Archive leaderboard report
Image Generation ImageNet 256x256 MDT FID 1.79 #40 of 94 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.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDiffusionDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSPEEDSoftmaxTransformer

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