Revisiting Feature Disentanglement Strategy in Diffusion Training and Breaking Conditional Independence Assumption in Sampling

Wonwoong Cho*, Hareesh Ravi*, Midhun Harikumar, Vinh Khuc, Krishna Kumar Singh, Jingwan Lu, David Iseri Inouye*, Ajinkya Kale* ;

"As Diffusion Models have shown promising performance, a lot of efforts have been made to improve the controllability of Diffusion Models. However, how to train Diffusion Models to have the disentangled latent spaces and how to naturally incorporate the disentangled conditions during the sampling process have been underexplored. In this paper, we present a training framework for feature disentanglement of Diffusion Models (FDiff). We further propose two sampling methods that can boost the realism of our Diffusion Models and also enhance the controllability. Concisely, we train Diffusion Models conditioned on two latent features, a spatial content mask, and a flattened style embedding. We rely on the inductive bias of the denoising process of Diffusion Models to encode pose/layout information in the content feature and semantic/style information in the style feature. Regarding the sampling methods, we first generalize Composable Diffusion Models (GCDM) by breaking the conditional independence assumption to allow for some dependence between conditional inputs, which is shown to be effective in realistic generation in our experiments. Second, we propose timestep-dependent weight scheduling for content and style features to further improve the performance. We also observe better controllability of our proposed methods compared to existing methods in image manipulation and image translation."