BASIC DIFFUSION MODELS NOTATIONS

Notation Description
$T$ Total number of time steps of the diffusion process
$t$ Time step $t$ on the range of $[0,T]$
$t$ $[0,T]$
${|\cdot|}$ ${L_2}$ norm
$\mu$ & $\Sigma$ Mean and Variance
$b$ Bias term
$\epsilon$ Standard Gaussian Noise
$x_T$ Input data becomes indistinguishable from an Isotropic Gaussian Noise
$\mathcal{N}$ Normal Distribution
$\beta_t$ Variance coefficient at time $t$
$\alpha_t$ $1-\beta_t$
$\bar{\alpha}{_t}$ Cumulative product of $\alpha_t$
$x$ Input Data
$x_0$ Unperturbed data in diffusion model
$x_t$ Diffused data in diffusion model
$q({x_t\mid{x_{t-1}}})$ The forward noising Process
$q({x_{t-1}\mid{x_t}})$ The backward noising process
$\mu_{\theta}({{x_t,t})}$ Learnable Mean in the backward process at time $t$
$\Sigma_{\theta}(x_t,t)$ Learnable Variance in the backward process at time $t$
$q(x_t\mid x_{t-1}) = \mathcal{N(x_t; \sqrt{1-\beta_t{x_{t-1}}\beta_t}I)}$ This takes the image at the previous step, rescales the pixel values in this image and then adds tiny bit of noise via the variance scheduler "per time step"
$L_{(VLB)}$ Variational Lower Bound
$D_{KL}{\space}q(x_T{\mid}x_0){\mid}p(x_T ))$ Kulliback Leibler Divergence between two Gaussian Distributions
$q({x_1\space,{\dots,}\space{x_T}}\mid{x_0})$ Joint distribution of all the samples generated in the forward process consitioned on $x_0$

REFERENCES

  1. Ling Yang, Zhilong Zhang, Shenda Hong, Runsheng Xu, Yue Zhao, Yingxia Shao, Wentao Zhang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Bin Cui. 2022. Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications.
  2. Alexander Quinn Nichol and Prafulla Dhariwal. 2021. Improved denoising diffusion probabilistic models. In International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 8162–8171.
  3. Jonathan Ho et al. (2020). Denoising diffusion probabilistic models.