Diffusion Explorer: Interactive Exploration of Diffusion Models

TL;DR

Diffusion Explorer is an interactive tool that visualizes the geometric properties and sampling dynamics of diffusion models, making complex stochastic processes more understandable through browser-based training and animation.

Contribution

It introduces a user-friendly, browser-based platform for visualizing diffusion models' geometry and dynamics, filling a gap in accessible educational resources.

Findings

Enables training of 2D diffusion models in-browser

Provides dynamic visualizations of diffusion sampling processes

Enhances understanding of diffusion models' geometric properties

Abstract

Diffusion models have been central to the development of recent image, video, and even text generation systems. They posses striking geometric properties that can be faithfully portrayed in low-dimensional settings. However, existing resources for explaining diffusion either require an advanced theoretical foundation or focus on their neural network architectures rather than their rich geometric properties. We introduce Diffusion Explorer, an interactive tool to explain the geometric properties of diffusion models. Users can train 2D diffusion models in the browser and observe the temporal dynamics of their sampling process. Diffusion Explorer leverages interactive animation, which has been shown to be a powerful tool for making engaging visualizations of dynamic systems, making it well suited to explaining diffusion models which represent stochastic processes that evolve over time. Diffusion Explorer is open source and a live demo is available at alechelbling.com/Diffusion-Explorer.