Reading Assignment 10: Denoising Diffusion Models

Literature on diffusion models is mathematically complex and usually quite dense. You have multiple choices to get an overview of how they function, but all of them will be somewhat challenging:

• The Bishop book gives an in-depth introduction to the theory and application in Chapter 20. You can skip section 20.3 on score-based models (unless you didn’t read it last time :) ), but do read 20.4 for the extremely important concept of guided diffusion.
• The original paper is a landmark in generative modeling, and gives more details on many practical aspects, such as the diffusion schedule, network architectures, etc. The mathematical part, however, is extremely dense.
• Murphy’s book again offers an alternative in Chapter 25, but this is also very dense, and treats several advanced topics you won’t need right now.