A wide variety of deep generative models has been developed in the past decade. Yet, these models often struggle with simultaneously addressing three key requirements including: high sample quality, mode coverage, and fast sampling. We call the challenge imposed by these requirements the generative learning trilemma, as the existing models often trade some of them for others. Particularly, denoising diffusion models have shown impressive sample quality and diversity, but their expensive sampling does not yet allow them to be applied in many real-world applications. In this paper, we argue that slow sampling in these models is fundamentally attributed to the Gaussian assumption in the denoising step which is justified only for small step sizes. To enable denoising with large steps, and hence, to reduce the total number of denoising steps, we propose to model the denoising distribution using a complex multimodal distribution. We introduce denoising diffusion generative adversarial networks (denoising diffusion GANs) that model each denoising step using a multimodal conditional GAN. Through extensive evaluations, we show that denoising diffusion GANs obtain sample quality and diversity competitive with original diffusion models while being 2000× faster on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Compared to traditional GANs, our model exhibits better mode coverage and sample diversity. To the best of our knowledge, denoising diffusion GAN is the first model that reduces sampling cost in diffusion models to an extent that allows them to be applied to real-world applications inexpensively. Project page and code: https://nvlabs.github.io/denoising-diffusion-gan. * Work done during an internship at NVIDIA.

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Unsupervised outlier detection, which predicts if a test sample is an outlier or not using only the information from unlabelled inlier data, is an important but challenging task. Recently, methods based on the two-stage framework achieve state-of-the-art performance on this task. The framework leverages self-supervised representation learning algorithms to train a feature extractor on inlier data, and applies a simple outlier detector in the feature space. In this paper, we explore the possibility of avoiding the high cost of training a distinct representation for each outlier detection task, and instead using a single pre-trained network as the universal feature extractor regardless of the source of indomain data. In particular, we replace the task-specific feature extractor by one network pre-trained on ImageNet with a self-supervised loss. In experiments, we demonstrate competitive or better performance on a variety of outlier detection benchmarks compared with previous two-stage methods, suggesting that learning representations from in-domain data may be unnecessary for outlier detection.

Energy-based models (EBMs) have recently been successful in representing complex distributions of small images. However, sampling from them requires expensive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) iterations that mix slowly in high dimensional pixel space. Unlike EBMs, variational autoencoders (VAEs) generate samples quickly and are equipped with a latent space that enables fast traversal of the data manifold. However, VAEs tend to assign high probability density to regions in data space outside the actual data distribution and often fail at generating sharp images. In this paper, we propose VAEBM, a symbiotic composition of a VAE and an EBM that offers the best of both worlds. VAEBM captures the overall mode structure of the data distribution using a state-of-the-art VAE and it relies on its EBM component to explicitly exclude non-data-like regions from the model and refine the image samples. Moreover, the VAE component in VAEBM allows us to speed up MCMC updates by reparameterizing them in the VAE's latent space. Our experimental results show that VAEBM outperforms state-of-the-art VAEs and EBMs in generative quality on several benchmark image datasets by a large margin. It can generate high-quality images as large as 256×256 pixels with short MCMC chains. We also demonstrate that VAEBM provides complete mode coverage and performs well in out-of-distribution detection.

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