DiffusionBench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Generative Diffusion Transformers

Hacker News Top Papers

Summary

Introduces DiffusionBench, a unified benchmark for holistic evaluation of generative diffusion transformers, supporting multiple generation tasks and providing standardized training and evaluation.

No content available
Original Article
View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 06/24/26, 04:48 AM

End2End-Diffusion/diffusion-bench

Source: https://github.com/End2End-Diffusion/diffusion-bench

DiffusionBench logo diffusion-bench

##############################################################################
#                                                                            #
#   ____  _  __  __           _                            .-----------.     #
#  |  _ \(_)/ _|/ _|_   _ ___(_) ___  _ __                 |           |     #
#  | | | | | |_| |_| | | / __| |/ _ \| '_ \                | ░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓ |     #
#  | |_| | |  _|  _| |_| \__ \ | (_) | | | |               | ▒▓█████▓▒ |     #
#  |____/|_|_| |_|  \__,_|___/_|\___/|_| |_|               | ▓███████▓ |     #
#                                                          |     ↓     |     #
#   ____                  _                                | █████████ |     #
#  | __ )  ___ _ __   ___| |__                             | ▓███████▓ |     #
#  |  _ \ / _ \ '_ \ / __| '_ \                            | ▒▓█████▓▒ |     #
#  | |_) |  __/ | | | (__| | | |                           |           |     #
#  |____/ \___|_| |_|\___|_| |_|                           '-----------'     #
#                                                                            #
#           Because ImageNet evaluation alone is no longer enough!           #
#                                                                            #
##############################################################################

Arxiv GitHub HuggingFace Discord Blog

📣 Announcement post: Call for DiffusionBench: A Holistic Benchmark for Diffusion Transformers. Help us grow the benchmark with new evaluation axes, new metrics, and faithful reproductions of published methods.

This repo contains the unified codebase for DiffusionBench. It supports training and evaluation across different generation tasks (ImageNet, T2I, …) through a single interface. Please see the sections below for the detailed structure. Come join us!

Qualitative results from DiffusionBench
Text-to-image samples at 256×256 from models trained for 200K iterations using DiffusionBench.

Quickstart

Setup

# install uv project manager (if you don't already have it)
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# install dependencies
uv sync

# prepare data
uv run python scripts/prepare.py --data {all,imagenet,t2i,eval}

# download pretrained models
uv run hf download diffusion-bench/diffusion-bench --local-dir pretrained_models --exclude .gitattributes

Training

Reproduction flow: Stage 1 → Stage 2. Set these environment variables first (used for the output directory and W&B logging):

export EXPERIMENT_NAME=<run-name>
export ENTITY=<wandb-entity>
export PROJECT=<wandb-project>
export WANDB_KEY=<key>

Stage 1. Train the RAE tokenizer:

uv run torchrun --standalone --nproc_per_node=8 \
    src/train_stage1.py \
    --config [STAGE1_CONFIG_PATH] \
    --results-dir results/stage1 --precision bf16 --compile --wandb

Stage 2. Train the diffusion model on VAE/RAE/Pixel space:

uv run torchrun --standalone --nproc_per_node=8 \
    src/train.py \
    --config [STAGE2_CONFIG_PATH] \
    --results-dir results/stage2 --precision bf16 --compile --wandb

Evaluation

Stage 2 training configs run online evaluation during training (the eval: block). For standalone evaluation of a released checkpoint, use the sampling/ configs — each embeds stage_2.ckpt (pointing into pretrained_models/) and the eval-time guidance, so the weights load automatically:

export EXPERIMENT_NAME=<run-name>

# stage 1 reconstruction (rFID/PSNR/SSIM/LPIPS)
uv run torchrun --nproc_per_node=8 src/offline_eval_stage1.py --config [STAGE1_CONFIG_PATH]

# stage 2 generation (FID/IS, GenEval/DPGBench/...)
uv run torchrun --nproc_per_node=8 src/offline_eval.py --config [STAGE2_CONFIG_PATH]

Available Configs

configs/
├── stage1/
└── stage2/
    ├── training/
    │   ├── imagenet/
    │   └── t2i/
    └── sampling/
        ├── imagenet/
        └── t2i/

Stage 2 spans VAE (11), RAE (6), REG (4), and Pixel (3) families, identical across ImageNet and T2I. Swap any config between tasks with a single path change. The sampling/ set mirrors training/ but adds the trained checkpoint and eval-time guidance, so it runs offline eval directly.

For ImageNet, pick the CFG-off baseline ([STAGE2_CONFIG_PATH].yaml) or the per-model best-CFG variant ([STAGE2_CONFIG_PATH]-cfg<scale>-t0.0-0.9.yaml).

Supported Methods

CategoryMethods
Latent SpacePixel Space
RAE (30+ representation encoders): DINOv2 SigLIP2 WebSSL PE LangPE and more
RAEv2 (30+ representation encoders): DINOv2 SigLIP2 WebSSL PE LangPE etc
VAE (10+ VAEs): FLUX.2 FLUX.1 SD3.5 VA-VAE E2E-VAE and more
Output Predictionx-prediction v-prediction
TransportRectified-Flow MeanFlow Improved-MeanFlow Pixel-MeanFlow Drifting
LossFlow Matching REPA iREPA
ArchitectureLightningDiT JiT DDT
TasksImageNet: class-conditional generation
T2I: text-to-image generation
EvaluationImageNet: FID IS
T2I: GenEval DPGBench GenAIBench VQAScore
Training BackendDDP FSDP [TODO]

Compatibility

StatusDetails
Coding AgentsYesAgent-compatible. See skills/ for setup and workflow skills.
AutoResearch[TODO]AutoResearch integration is planned (not yet available).

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please refer to docs/contributors.md and docs/contributing.md for further details.

Acknowledgments

The codebase is built upon some amazing projects:

We thank the authors for making their work publicly available.

Similar Articles

DiffusionBench: On Holistic Evaluation of Diffusion Transformers

Hugging Face Daily Papers

Researchers introduce NanoGen, a unified framework for training and evaluating diffusion transformers, and propose DiffusionBench, a holistic benchmark combining ImageNet class-conditional and text-to-image generation to better assess progress in generative modeling.

Diffusion Language Models: An Experimental Analysis

arXiv cs.AI

A systematic experimental analysis evaluating eight state-of-the-art Diffusion Language Models across multiple benchmarks, analyzing trade-offs between generation quality and computational efficiency.