@m8ta @themanual4am Hey, welcome to the party! Glad you found the conversation interesting.
I'm not very familiar with diffusion models, so I'm not sure. But I suppose the general idea of iteratively refining local patterns to create a global image is the same, so there's likely some connection there!
I'm not at all familiar with adaptive instance normalization. But this is a pretty simple NN architecture with some very standard parts in it. I'm sure it resembles many other models.
I think the answer to your second question is a simple "yes," though I'm a little thrown by your wording. The original NCA paper shows that a continuous-state CA can be implemented with a CNN.