cs.CVMay 25, 2026

Everything at Every Scale: Scale-Invariant Diffusion with Continuous Super-Resolution

Authors: Zixin Jessie ChenZhuo ChenArcher WangJeff GoreWilliam T. FreemanCongyue DengMarin Soljačić

Organizations: Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology · NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions · Institute for Data, Systems and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Department of EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

Creating images from noise is image generation; reconstructing fine details from coarse inputs is super-resolution. Despite their practical differences, both can be understood as reversing information loss across scales. We introduce SKILD\textbf{SKILD}, a S\textbf{S}cale-invariant K\textbf{K}-Space I\textbf{I}mage L\textbf{L}earning D\textbf{D}iffusion model that unifies generation and continuous super-resolution within a single unconditional framework. Both natural images and critical physical systems exhibit scale invariance, and we leverage it to design a forward process that attenuates image content from fine to coarse scales while injecting spectrum-matched Gaussian noise, making scale an explicit coordinate of the diffusion dynamics. The same trained reverse process performs generation and continuous super-resolution by varying only the starting timestep: no task-specific architecture, no conditioning branch, no classifier-free guidance, no retraining per scale factor\textit{no task-specific architecture, no conditioning branch, no classifier-free guidance, no retraining per scale factor}. Empirically, SKILD reaches FID 2.652.65 and Inception Score 9.639.63 on unconditional CIFAR-10, performs 2×2\times--8×8\times super-resolution on ImageNet from a single unconditional checkpoint while outperforming conditional models across perceptual metrics, and reconstructs critical Ising models whose connected four-point correlations closely track the ground truth.

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