ResEnsemble-DDPM: Residual Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Ensemble Learning

Abstract

Nowadays, denoising diffusion probabilistic models have been adapted for many image segmentation tasks. However, existing end-to-end models have already demonstrated remarkable capabilities. Rather than using denoising diffusion probabilistic models alone, integrating the abilities of both denoising diffusion probabilistic models and existing end-to-end models can better improve the performance of image segmentation. Based on this, we implicitly introduce residual term into the diffusion process and propose ResEnsemble-DDPM, which seamlessly integrates the diffusion model and the end-to-end model through ensemble learning. The output distributions of these two models are strictly symmetric with respect to the ground truth distribution, allowing us to integrate the two models by reducing the residual term. Experimental results demonstrate that our ResEnsemble-DDPM can further improve the capabilities of existing models. Furthermore, its ensemble learning strategy can be generalized to other downstream tasks in image generation and get strong competitiveness.