  Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable progress in image generation
quality, especially when guidance is used to control the generative process.
However, guidance requires a large amount of image-annotation pairs for
training and is thus dependent on their availability, correctness and
unbiasedness. In this paper, we eliminate the need for such annotation by
instead leveraging the flexibility of self-supervision signals to design a
framework for self-guided diffusion models. By leveraging a feature extraction
function and a self-annotation function, our method provides guidance signals
at various image granularities: from the level of holistic images to object
boxes and even segmentation masks. Our experiments on single-label and
multi-label image datasets demonstrate that self-labeled guidance always
outperforms diffusion models without guidance and may even surpass guidance
based on ground-truth labels, especially on unbalanced data. When equipped with
self-supervised box or mask proposals, our method further generates visually
diverse yet semantically consistent images, without the need for any class,
box, or segment label annotation. Self-guided diffusion is simple, flexible and
expected to profit from deployment at scale. Source code will be at:
https://taohu.me/sgdm/
