ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

Amortized Guidance for Image Inpainting with Pretrained Diffusion Models

ai-technology · 2026-05-14

Researchers introduce Amortized Inpainting with Diffusion (AID), a method for image inpainting using pretrained diffusion models. Unlike existing approaches that train dedicated models or adapt per image, AID keeps the diffusion backbone fixed and trains a small reusable guidance module offline. This module is then applied across masked images without per-instance optimization. The problem is formulated as deterministic guidance with a supervised terminal objective, made learnable via an auxiliary Gaussian formulation. A continuous-time actor-critic algorithm learns the guidance module in a data-driven manner. Experiments on AFHQv2 and FFHQ under pixel EDM demonstrate effectiveness.

Key facts

  • AID keeps a pretrained diffusion backbone fixed.
  • A small guidance module is trained offline and reused.
  • No per-instance optimization is required at deployment.
  • Formulated as deterministic guidance with supervised terminal objective.
  • Auxiliary Gaussian formulation makes the problem learnable.
  • Continuous-time actor-critic algorithm is used for learning.
  • Tested on AFHQv2 and FFHQ datasets.
  • Method is a middle ground between task-specific models and per-image adaptation.

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