diffusers/docs/source/en/api/schedulers/overview.mdx

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# Schedulers

Diffusers contains multiple pre-built schedule functions for the diffusion process.

## What is a scheduler?

The schedule functions, denoted *Schedulers* in the library take in the output of a trained model, a sample which the diffusion process is iterating on, and a timestep to return a denoised sample. That's why schedulers may also be called *Samplers* in other diffusion models implementations.

- Schedulers define the methodology for iteratively adding noise to an image or for updating a sample based on model outputs.
    - adding noise in different manners represent the algorithmic processes to train a diffusion model by adding noise to images.
    - for inference, the scheduler defines how to update a sample based on an output from a pretrained model.
- Schedulers are often defined by a *noise schedule* and an *update rule* to solve the differential equation solution.

### Discrete versus continuous schedulers

All schedulers take in a timestep to predict the updated version of the sample being diffused.
The timesteps dictate where in the diffusion process the step is, where data is generated by iterating forward in time and inference is executed by propagating backwards through timesteps.
Different algorithms use timesteps that can be discrete (accepting `int` inputs), such as the [`DDPMScheduler`] or [`PNDMScheduler`], or continuous (accepting `float` inputs), such as the score-based schedulers [`ScoreSdeVeScheduler`] or [`ScoreSdeVpScheduler`].

## Designing Re-usable schedulers

The core design principle between the schedule functions is to be model, system, and framework independent.
This allows for rapid experimentation and cleaner abstractions in the code, where the model prediction is separated from the sample update.
To this end, the design of schedulers is such that:

- Schedulers can be used interchangeably between diffusion models in inference to find the preferred trade-off between speed and generation quality.
- Schedulers are currently by default in PyTorch, but are designed to be framework independent (partial Jax support currently exists).
- Many diffusion pipelines, such as [`StableDiffusionPipeline`] and [`DiTPipeline`] can use any of [`KarrasDiffusionSchedulers`]

## Schedulers Summary

The following table summarizes all officially supported schedulers, their corresponding paper

| Scheduler | Paper |
|---|---|
| [ddim](./ddim) | [**Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02502) |
| [ddim_inverse](./ddim_inverse) | [**Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02502) |
| [ddpm](./ddpm) | [**Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11239) |
| [deis](./deis) | [**DEISMultistepScheduler**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13902) |
| [singlestep_dpm_solver](./singlestep_dpm_solver) | [**Singlestep DPM-Solver**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00927) |
| [multistep_dpm_solver](./multistep_dpm_solver) | [**Multistep DPM-Solver**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00927) |
| [heun](./heun) | [**Heun scheduler inspired by Karras et. al paper**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00364) |
| [dpm_discrete](./dpm_discrete) | [**DPM Discrete Scheduler inspired by Karras et. al paper**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00364) |
| [dpm_discrete_ancestral](./dpm_discrete_ancestral) | [**DPM Discrete Scheduler with ancestral sampling inspired by Karras et. al paper**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00364) |
| [stochastic_karras_ve](./stochastic_karras_ve) | [**Variance exploding, stochastic sampling from Karras et. al**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00364) |
| [lms_discrete](./lms_discrete) | [**Linear multistep scheduler for discrete beta schedules**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00364) |
| [pndm](./pndm) | [**Pseudo numerical methods for diffusion models (PNDM)**](https://github.com/crowsonkb/k-diffusion/blob/481677d114f6ea445aa009cf5bd7a9cdee909e47/k_diffusion/sampling.py#L181) |
| [score_sde_ve](./score_sde_ve) | [**variance exploding stochastic differential equation (VE-SDE) scheduler**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.13456) |
| [ipndm](./ipndm) | [**improved pseudo numerical methods for diffusion models (iPNDM)**](https://github.com/crowsonkb/v-diffusion-pytorch/blob/987f8985e38208345c1959b0ea767a625831cc9b/diffusion/sampling.py#L296) |
| [score_sde_vp](./score_sde_vp) | [**Variance preserving stochastic differential equation (VP-SDE) scheduler**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.13456) |
| [euler](./euler) | [**Euler scheduler**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00364) |
| [euler_ancestral](./euler_ancestral) | [**Euler Ancestral scheduler**](https://github.com/crowsonkb/k-diffusion/blob/481677d114f6ea445aa009cf5bd7a9cdee909e47/k_diffusion/sampling.py#L72) |
| [vq_diffusion](./vq_diffusion) | [**VQDiffusionScheduler**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.14822) |
| [unipc](./unipc) | [**UniPCMultistepScheduler**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04867) |
| [repaint](./repaint) | [**RePaint scheduler**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09865) |

## API

The core API for any new scheduler must follow a limited structure.
- Schedulers should provide one or more `def step(...)` functions that should be called to update the generated sample iteratively.
- Schedulers should provide a `set_timesteps(...)` method that configures the parameters of a schedule function for a specific inference task.
- Schedulers should be framework-specific.

The base class [`SchedulerMixin`] implements low level utilities used by multiple schedulers.

### SchedulerMixin
[[autodoc]] SchedulerMixin

### SchedulerOutput
The class [`SchedulerOutput`] contains the outputs from any schedulers `step(...)` call.

[[autodoc]] schedulers.scheduling_utils.SchedulerOutput

### KarrasDiffusionSchedulers

`KarrasDiffusionSchedulers` encompasses the main generalization of schedulers in Diffusers. The schedulers in this class are distinguished, at a high level, by their noise sampling strategy; the type of network and scaling; and finally the training strategy or how the loss is weighed.

The different schedulers, depending on the type of ODE solver, fall into the above taxonomy and provide a good abstraction for the design of the main schedulers implemented in Diffusers. The schedulers in this class are given below:

[[autodoc]] schedulers.scheduling_utils.KarrasDiffusionSchedulers