Improved Distributional Diffusion Models

Abstract:Distributional Diffusion Models (DDMs) replace the standard mean-prediction denoiser with a \emph{distributional} denoiser trained via a scoring rule objective, learning a stochastic approximation to $p(x_1 \mid x_t)$ rather than its conditional mean. However, scaling DDMs to modern image-generation settings faces two obstacles: (i) multi-particle training incurs overhead that scales with the number of particles, (ii) DDMs use globally fixed scoring rule hyperparameters, forcing a single trade-off across sampling budgets. We mitigate these limitations by deferring particle expansion to late transformer layers, and the hyperparameter trade-off by introducing time-dependent scoring rule schedules informed by the dynamical regimes of~\citet{Biroli2024}. Combined with a DiT-based latent setup, these changes make DDM training practical on class-conditional ImageNet-$256^2$, achieving 4.48 FID at 4 steps and 2.38 at 50 steps with DiT-XL/2, from a single model trained from scratch in one stage, without a teacher, self-distillation or JVPs. The result is a stochastic few-step generator whose FID does not degrade as the sampling budget grows from 4 to 50 NFE, and the same recipe transfers to text-to-image generation. Code and pre-trained models available at this https URL.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.37147 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.37147v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.37147 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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