Diffusion Models
Concept
Core Technical
Generation by denoising — the engine of images and video.
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Diffusion models learn to reverse noise: start from static, subtract noise step by step, arrive at an image (or video, or protein pose) matching the prompt. Stable Diffusion, FLUX, Sora-class video and AlphaFold 3's structure module all use it. Inference takes many denoising steps, which is why image/video generation is so much more compute-hungry per output than text.
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Record reviewed as of 2026-01-15 — see Methodology.