  Score distillation sampling (SDS) has shown great promise in text-to-3D
generation by distilling pretrained large-scale text-to-image diffusion models,
but suffers from over-saturation, over-smoothing, and low-diversity problems.
In this work, we propose to model the 3D parameter as a random variable instead
of a constant as in SDS and present variational score distillation (VSD), a
principled particle-based variational framework to explain and address the
aforementioned issues in text-to-3D generation. We show that SDS is a special
case of VSD and leads to poor samples with both small and large CFG weights. In
comparison, VSD works well with various CFG weights as ancestral sampling from
diffusion models and simultaneously improves the diversity and sample quality
with a common CFG weight (i.e., $7.5$). We further present various improvements
in the design space for text-to-3D such as distillation time schedule and
density initialization, which are orthogonal to the distillation algorithm yet
not well explored. Our overall approach, dubbed ProlificDreamer, can generate
high rendering resolution (i.e., $512\times512$) and high-fidelity NeRF with
rich structure and complex effects (e.g., smoke and drops). Further,
initialized from NeRF, meshes fine-tuned by VSD are meticulously detailed and
photo-realistic. Project page and codes:
https://ml.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/prolificdreamer/
