Model Collapse in the Self-Consuming Chain of Diffusion Finetuning: A Novel Perspective from Quantitative Trait Modeling

Abstract

*Model collapse*, the severe degradation of generative models when iteratively trained on their own outputs, has gained significant attention in recent years. This paper examines Chain of Diffusion, where a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model is finetuned on its own generated images. We demonstrate that severe image quality degradation was universal and identify *CFG scale* as the key factor impacting this model collapse. Drawing on an analogy between the Chain of Diffusion and biological evolution, we then introduce a novel theoretical analysis based on quantitative trait modeling. Our theoretical analysis aligns with empirical observations of the generated images in the Chain of Diffusion. Finally, we propose Reusable Diffusion Finetuning (ReDiFine), a simple yet effective strategy inspired by genetic mutations. It operates robustly across various scenarios without requiring any hyperparameter tuning, making it a plug-and-play solution for reusable image generation.