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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

FrequencyBooster: Advancing Pixel Diffusion for High-Fidelity Image Generation

Lichen Ma, Zipeng Guo, Yu He, Xiaolong Fu, Luohang Liu, Jingling Fu, Junshi Huang, Yan Li

Abstract

To circumvent the inherent fidelity bottlenecks and optimization misalignment of VAE-based latent diffusion, pixel-space diffusion models have emerged as a compelling end-to-end paradigm. However, existing pixel diffusion models often struggle to balance computational efficiency with the preservation of high-frequency details. They frequently resort to patch-based compression or restricted local decoding, leading to a "spectral compromise" where high-frequency and fine-grained pixel information are suppressed. To address these challenges, we propose FrequencyBooster, a novel framework designed to empower pixel diffusion with full-frequency modeling capabilities without prohibitive overhead. The core of our method is a high-capacity decoder that specializes in extracting exhaustive high-frequency details and low-frequency semantics, the latter of which is derived from a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) backbone. Unlike prior works that sacrifice global context for local refinement, FrequencyBooster leverages high-dimensional feature representations to maintain global structural integrity while achieving superior pixel-level precision. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: our model achieves a state-of-the-art FID of 1.60 at resolution within only 320 epochs. Furthermore, at resolution, FrequencyBooster attains an FID of 1.69, significantly outperforming existing pixel-space and latent-space generative models.

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