From Noise to Image – interactive guide to diffusion

2/26/2026 at 9:02:08 AM

Hey, I made this, thanks for posting!

It’s purposefully high level and non-technical for a general audience - my theory was that most people who aren’t into tech/AI don’t care too much about training, or how the system got to be the way that it is.

But they do have some interest in how it actually operates once you’ve typed in a prompt.

Happy to answer any questions or take on board feedback

by whilefalse

2/28/2026 at 6:37:34 PM

I think some of the visualizations would be much better if you used a pixel-space model instead of a latent diffusion model.

Right now we are only seeing the denoising process after it's been morphed by the latent decoder, which looks a lot less intuitive than actual pixel diffusion.

If you can't find a suitable pixel-space model, then you can just trivially generate a forward process and play it backwards.

by in-silico

2/28/2026 at 7:44:39 PM

Thanks that’s a great suggestion.

by whilefalse

2/28/2026 at 11:29:49 PM

Thanks for this!

Has there been any study of grammar and other word order effects in the result? Is "Dog fetches ball with tail" more likely to produce an image of dog with a ball grabbed with its tail than "tail ball dog fetch with"?

Like search engines, an issue is user searched for "best price on windows". Do they mean windows the OS or glass windows.

My impression, at least with image generation I've used, it's while there is some mapping of words and maybe phrases through the latent space to an image it's very weak. If you put "red ball" in a long prompt, it's nearly as likely "red" will get applied to some other part of the description than the ball.

by socalgal2

3/1/2026 at 11:16:59 AM

Honestly I don’t know the answer to that but it’s a good question and something interesting to look into. The PRX model I used ran pretty well on my MacBook M4 so you could play around, although I guess it will depend on the specifics of the model.

When I was building this I did have to rework the prompts quite a bit so they worked nicely with the word-by-word reveal visualisation, i.e. they mention the subject early, then add adjectives about setting and light etc.

by whilefalse

2/28/2026 at 4:13:01 PM

Loved the writeup!

Found the manual latent space exploration part really interesting.

Too many LLM/diffusion explanations fall in the proverbial “how to draw an owl” meme without giving a taste as to what’s going on.

by BobbyTables2

2/28/2026 at 6:14:21 PM

It's quite clever and thoughtful. thanks for making it!

by adampunk

2/28/2026 at 5:25:05 PM

I enjoyed this a lot.

The interpolations between butterfly and snail were pretty horrifying. But something like Z-Image you could basically concatenate the text and end up with a normal image of both. Is the latent space for "butterfly and snail" just well off the path between the two individually?

It's hard to imagine what is nearby in latent space and how text contributes, so I did really like the section adding words to the prompt 1-by-1.

by plagiarist

2/28/2026 at 7:48:05 PM

This is awesome. If you made a book or video-course that takes this level of high level explanation and translate it to the technical and then mathematical level, I would buy it in an heartbeat.

This is what I think is missing in most AI (broad sense) learning resources. They focus too much on the math that I miss the intuitive process behind it.

by rrgok

3/1/2026 at 4:43:02 PM

Pretty cool, playing with the guidance scale slider here taught me more than re-reading the DDPM paper did.

Thanks for sharing!!

by 7777777phil

3/1/2026 at 7:47:35 AM

Thanks for this article, this is the best explanation and visualization I have seen for explaining this flow. Great work!

by heydanwhatsup

3/1/2026 at 4:42:46 AM

Scroll to visualise steps is such a great idea! Great writeup.

by k2so

3/1/2026 at 10:11:46 AM

Ha, I was going to say the exact opposite. My first thought was that the website was broken.

by dented42

3/1/2026 at 11:18:36 AM

The scroll trigger was something I’ve seen and wanted to play around with, but I know it’s controversial so I added the toggle as well (upper left corner).

by whilefalse

2/28/2026 at 4:32:31 PM

Oh I particularly loved that you made the prompts themselves interchangeable. Very well done!

by ibizaman

2/28/2026 at 4:11:34 PM

Amazing explanations!! I absolutely love this. In 10 minutes it’s given me a huge boost in my intuition on diffusion, which I’ve been missing for years.

by khazhoux

2/28/2026 at 6:53:27 PM

If the prompt is the compass, and represents a point in space, why walk there? Why not just go to that point in image space directly, what would be there? When does the random seed matter if you're aiming at the same point anyway, don't you end up there? Does the prompt vector not exist in the image manifold, or is there some local sampling done to pick images which are more represented in the training data?

by adammarples

2/28/2026 at 7:50:10 PM

So I’m not an expert, this post was just based on my understanding, but as I understand it: the prompt embedding space and the latent image space are different “spaces”, so there is no single “point” in the latent image space that represents a given prompt. There are regions that are more or less consistent with the prompt, and due to cross-attention between the text embedding vector and the latent image vector, it’s able to guide the diffusion process in a suitable direction.

So different seeds lead to slightly different end points, because you’re just moving closer to the “consistent region” at each step, but approaching from a different angle.

by whilefalse

3/1/2026 at 12:26:08 AM

One way of thinking about diffusion is that you're learning a velocity field from unlikely to likely images in the latent space, and that field changes depending on your conditioning prompt. You start from a known starting point (a noise distribution), and then take small steps following the velocity field, eventually ending up at a stable endpoint (which corresponds to the final image). Because your starting point is a random sample from a noise distribution, if you pick a slightly different starting point (seed), you'll end up at a slightly different endpoint.

You can't jump to the endpoint because you don't know where it is - all you can compute is 'from where I am, which direction should my next step be.' This is also why the results for few-step diffusion are so poor - if you take big jumps over the velocity field you're only going in approximately the right direction, so you won't end up at a properly stable point which corresponds to a "likely" image.

by ainch

2/28/2026 at 3:00:07 PM

Scrolling through pics on mobile is difficult. Wanted to see all 29 steps but couldnt scroll it reliably.

by K2h

2/28/2026 at 4:10:13 PM

Turning off the scroll mode worked very well for me on a mobile.

by BobbyTables2