Los Alamos National Laboratory has announced the development of an innovative artificial intelligence framework, "Blackout Diffusion," which is designed to generate images from nothing. The team at Los Alamos conducted comprehensive testing of Blackout Diffusion, evaluating its capabilities on a variety of standardized datasets.
Unveiled at the International Conference on Machine Learning, Blackout Diffusion outperforms existing models such as DALL-E and Midjourney in terms of generating high-quality samples using fewer computational resources. According to a press release by Los Alamos National Laboratory, it dispels misconceptions about diffusion models and offers a more efficient approach for scientific simulations on supercomputers. This contributes to progress while minimizing environmental impact.
Javier Santos, an AI researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of Blackout Diffusion, said in a press release by the laboratory that "Generative modeling is bringing in the next industrial revolution with its capability to assist many tasks, such as generation of software code, legal documents and even art." Santos further noted that "Generative modeling could be leveraged for making scientific discoveries, and our team’s work laid down the foundation and practical algorithms for applying generative diffusion modeling to scientific problems that are not continuous in nature."
Yen Ting Lin, the Los Alamos physicist who led the Blackout Diffusion collaboration, also shared his insights in the same press release. Lin stated that "We showed that the quality of samples generated by Blackout Diffusion is comparable to current models using a smaller computational space." He further explained that "In order to run existing generative diffusion models, mathematically speaking, diffusion has to be living on a continuous domain; it cannot be discrete."
Established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos National Laboratory operates as a multi-program research center located approximately 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe. The laboratory focuses on nuclear weapons design and production, addressing nuclear threats, and conducting national security science, technology, and engineering, according to the About webpage provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory.
