October 2026(A GROUP) - Lecture 8: Latent Diffusion and Stable Diffusion

Core paper:

High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
Robin Rombach et al., 2021 / 2022

Why it is essential:

This is the core paper behind Stable Diffusion. It applies diffusion in the latent space of a pretrained autoencoder, greatly reducing computation, and uses cross-attention for text and other conditioning signals. arXiv

Topics:

• Why not diffuse directly in pixel space

• VAE latent space

• Cross-attention

• Text conditioning

• Inpainting, super-resolution, image-to-image

Key concept:

image → VAE encoder → latent
diffusion denoising in latent space
latent → VAE decoder → image

Engineering connection:

• Stable Diffusion

• SDXL

• Image-to-image

• Inpainting

• ControlNet

• Multi-image reference