Understanding diffusion through VAE
This post is an introduction on diffusion written for my younger self. If you are new to diffusion and already familiar with VAE, this may be a good entry point for you. Diffusion has blown up over the past few years, with a huge amount of literature produced, but many differ in how they frame this modeling paradigm1. I do not intend to approach this via the most standardized or unified theory. I am not the best person to do that, nor do I think that angle helped me the most when approaching the subject (see my previous post). While many explanations derive diffusion from first principles, I found it useful to start by understanding how the objective is shaped into something we can actually train. ...