Score Distillation via DDIM Inversion

Abstract

While 2D diffusion models generate realistic, high-detail images, 3D shape generation methods like Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) built on these 2D diffusion models produce cartoon-like, over-smoothed shapes. To help explain this discrepancy, in this paper we prove that the image guidance used in Score Distillation can be understood as the velocity field of a 2D denoising generative process, up to the choice of a noise term. In particular, after a change of variables, SDS resembles a high-variance version of Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) with a differently-sampled noise term: SDS introduces noise i.i.d. randomly at each step, while DDIM infers it from the previous noise predictions. This excessive variance can lead to over-smoothing and prevent the algorithm from generating realistic outputs. We show that a better noise approximation can be recovered by inverting DDIM in each SDS update step. This modification makes SDS’s generative process for 2D images identical to DDIM, up to our change of variables. In 3D, it removes over-smoothing, preserves higher-frequency detail, and brings the generation quality closer to that of 2D samplers. Experimentally, our method achieves better or similar 3D generation quality compared to other works that improve SDS, all without training additional neural networks or 3D supervision. Our findings bridge the gap between 2D and 3D asset generation.