IBCD: Single-Step Bidirectional Unpaired Image Translation Using Implicit Bridge Consistency Distillation

KAIST1, Samsung Research2
*Indicates Equal Contribution
teasure

IBCD achieves the best faithfulness-realism trade-off in a single step with superior efficiency.

Abstract

Unpaired image-to-image translation has seen significant progress since the introduction of CycleGAN. However, methods based on diffusion models or Schrödinger bridges have yet to be widely adopted in real-world applications due to their iterative sampling nature. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework, Implicit Bridge Consistency Distillation (IBCD), which enables single-step bidirectional unpaired translation without using adversarial loss. IBCD extends consistency distillation by using a diffusion implicit bridge model that connects PF-ODE trajectories between distributions. Additionally, we introduce two key improvements: 1) distribution matching for consistency distillation and 2) adaptive weighting method based on distillation difficulty. Experimental results demonstrate that IBCD achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets in a single generation step.



Method

method overview

Overview of IBCD framework. (a) IBCD performs single-step bi-directional translation using a distillation framework that extends consistency distillation with a diffusion implicit bridge. (b) The IBCD framework bridges two distributions by connecting the PF-ODE paths of two pre-trained diffusion models through bidirectionally extended consistency distillation. To mitigate distillation errors, we introduce distribution matching for consistency distillation and a cycle translation loss.



Result



toy experiment result

Every component of IBCD contributes additively to its overall effectiveness.



dynamic trade-off balancing

IBCD can dynamically balance the faithfulness-realism trade-off by tuning the weights of losses.