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Everything at Every Scale: Scale-Invariant Diffusion with Continuous Super-Resolution

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-05-26 v1 Statistical Mechanics Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Creating images from noise is image generation; reconstructing fine details from coarse inputs is super-resolution. Despite their practical differences, both can be understood as reversing information loss across scales. We introduce SKILD\textbf{SKILD}, a S\textbf{S}cale-invariant K\textbf{K}-Space I\textbf{I}mage L\textbf{L}earning D\textbf{D}iffusion model that unifies generation and continuous super-resolution within a single unconditional framework. Both natural images and critical physical systems exhibit scale invariance, and we leverage it to design a forward process that attenuates image content from fine to coarse scales while injecting spectrum-matched Gaussian noise, making scale an explicit coordinate of the diffusion dynamics. The same trained reverse process performs generation and continuous super-resolution by varying only the starting timestep: no task-specific architecture, no conditioning branch, no classifier-free guidance, no retraining per scale factor\textit{no task-specific architecture, no conditioning branch, no classifier-free guidance, no retraining per scale factor}. Empirically, SKILD reaches FID 2.652.65 and Inception Score 9.639.63 on unconditional CIFAR-10, performs 2×2\times--8×8\times super-resolution on ImageNet from a single unconditional checkpoint while outperforming conditional models across perceptual metrics, and reconstructs critical Ising models whose connected four-point correlations closely track the ground truth.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.26032,
  title  = {Everything at Every Scale: Scale-Invariant Diffusion with Continuous Super-Resolution},
  author = {Zixin Jessie Chen and Zhuo Chen and Archer Wang and Jeff Gore and William T. Freeman and Congyue Deng and Marin Soljačić},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26032},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

29 pages, 17 figures