Pseudorandom Streams within Diffusion Models Act as Learnable Inputs That Affect Generation Quality

Abstract:Diffusion models rely on stochastic inputs, yet on finite-precision hardware, the "randomness" they consume is realized as deterministic numerical orbits generated by pseudorandom rules. Accessible orbit structure can become a learnable input and affect both training and generation because the realized loss and its gradient depend on the concrete pseudorandom values consumed at each optimization step. A small multilayer perceptron predicts the next value of an orbit from its recent history, measuring general sequence predictability. A diffusion probe replaces real images with online random tensors while preserving the diffusion architecture and training objective, measuring whether the target system can exploit orbit structure. After controlling marginal statistics and screening out clear dynamical and finite-precision failures, the remaining orbits still produce markedly different diffusion losses and generation quality on MNIST and CIFAR-10. Both measures show strong rank correlations with macroscopic generation degradation, although their local rankings differ. After normalization by the IID baseline, the probe loss and the real-data diffusion loss approximately follow an empirical power law, with different exponents on the two datasets. These results suggest that a pseudorandom source is not only a distributional choice, but also a model-dependent structured input.

22 pages, 6 figures. Code and data are available at this https URL

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

arXiv:2608.02575 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.02575v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.02575 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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