What is Guidance?

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

This section is incomplete and subject to massive changes.

As originally conceived, there was no way to specify the sample generated by a diffusion model. For example, if your training images contained elves and bunnies, you can be sure that your model will generate either an elf or a bunny, but you can't specify which it should generate. If you wanted an elf specifically, your only hope was to run it on many different seeds and pray that one of those seeds made an elf.

This is where "Guidance" comes in. Guidance is the umbrella term for any method that steers the output of the model during generation. This can be anything from text to other input images, OpenPose, etc.