Marigold: Affordable Adaptation of Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Image Analysis

The success of deep learning in computer vision over the past decade has hinged on large labeled datasets and strong pretrained models. In data-scarce settings, the quality of these pretrained models becomes crucial for effective transfer learning. Image classification and self-supervised learning have traditionally been the primary methods for pretraining CNNs and transformer-based architectures. Recently, the rise of text-to-image generative models, particularly those using denoising diffusion in a latent space, has introduced a new class of foundational models trained on massive, captioned image datasets. These models' ability to generate realistic images of unseen content suggests they possess a deep understanding of the visual world. In this work, we present Marigold, a family of conditional generative models and a fine-tuning protocol that extracts the knowledge from pretrained latent diffusion models like Stable Diffusion and adapts them for dense image analysis tasks, including monocular depth estimation, surface normals prediction, and intrinsic decomposition. Marigold requires minimal modification of the pre-trained latent diffusion model's architecture, trains with small synthetic datasets on a single GPU over a few days, and demonstrates state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization. Project page:this https URL

@article{ke2025_2505.09358,
  title={ Marigold: Affordable Adaptation of Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Image Analysis },
  author={ Bingxin Ke and Kevin Qu and Tianfu Wang and Nando Metzger and Shengyu Huang and Bo Li and Anton Obukhov and Konrad Schindler },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09358},
  year={ 2025 }
}