Elucidating the Design Space of Arbitrary-Noise-Based Diffusion Models

Abstract: EDM elucidates the unified design space of diffusion models, yet its fixed noise patterns restricted to pure Gaussian noise, limit advancements in image restoration. Our study indicates that forcibly injecting Gaussian noise corrupts the degraded images, overextends the image transformation distance, and increases restoration complexity. To address this problem, our proposed EDA Elucidates the Design space of Arbitrary-noise-based diffusion models. Theoretically, EDA expands the freedom of noise pattern while preserving the original module flexibility of EDM, with rigorous proof that increased noise complexity incurs no additional computational overhead during restoration. EDA is validated on three typical tasks: MRI bias field correction (global smooth noise), CT metal artifact reduction (global sharp noise), and natural image shadow removal (local boundary-aware noise). With only 5 sampling steps, EDA outperforms most task-specific methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance in bias field correction and shadow removal.