GenTron: Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video Generation

Shoufa Chen, Mengmeng Xu, Jiawei Ren, Yuren Cong, Sen He, Yanping Xie, Animesh Sinha, Ping Luo, Tao Xiang, Juan-Manuel Perez-Rua; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 6441-6451

In this study we explore Transformer based diffusion models for image and video generation. Despite the dominance of Transformer architectures in various fields due to their flexibility and scalability the visual generative domain primarily utilizes CNN-based U-Net architectures particularly in diffusion-based models. We introduce GenTron a family of Generative models employing Transformer-based diffusion to address this gap. Our initial step was to adapt Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) from class to text conditioning a process involving thorough empirical exploration of the conditioning mechanism. We then scale GenTron from approximately 900M to over 3B parameters observing improvements in visual quality. Furthermore we extend GenTron to text-to-video generation incorporating novel motion-free guidance to enhance video quality. In human evaluations against SDXL GenTron achieves a 51.1% win rate in visual quality (with a 19.8% draw rate) and a 42.3% win rate in text alignment (with a 42.9% draw rate). GenTron notably performs well in T2I-CompBench highlighting its compositional generation ability. We hope GenTron could provide meaningful insights and serve as a valuable reference for future research. Please refer to the arXiv version for the most up-to-date results: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04557.