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Main Authors: Nielsen, Beatrix M. G., Christensen, Anders, Dittadi, Andrea, Winther, Ole
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.19789
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author Nielsen, Beatrix M. G.
Christensen, Anders
Dittadi, Andrea
Winther, Ole
author_facet Nielsen, Beatrix M. G.
Christensen, Anders
Dittadi, Andrea
Winther, Ole
contents Diffusion models may be viewed as hierarchical variational autoencoders (VAEs) with two improvements: parameter sharing for the conditional distributions in the generative process and efficient computation of the loss as independent terms over the hierarchy. We consider two changes to the diffusion model that retain these advantages while adding flexibility to the model. Firstly, we introduce a data- and depth-dependent mean function in the diffusion process, which leads to a modified diffusion loss. Our proposed framework, DiffEnc, achieves a statistically significant improvement in likelihood on CIFAR-10. Secondly, we let the ratio of the noise variance of the reverse encoder process and the generative process be a free weight parameter rather than being fixed to 1. This leads to theoretical insights: For a finite depth hierarchy, the evidence lower bound (ELBO) can be used as an objective for a weighted diffusion loss approach and for optimizing the noise schedule specifically for inference. For the infinite-depth hierarchy, on the other hand, the weight parameter has to be 1 to have a well-defined ELBO.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_19789
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DiffEnc: Variational Diffusion with a Learned Encoder
Nielsen, Beatrix M. G.
Christensen, Anders
Dittadi, Andrea
Winther, Ole
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Diffusion models may be viewed as hierarchical variational autoencoders (VAEs) with two improvements: parameter sharing for the conditional distributions in the generative process and efficient computation of the loss as independent terms over the hierarchy. We consider two changes to the diffusion model that retain these advantages while adding flexibility to the model. Firstly, we introduce a data- and depth-dependent mean function in the diffusion process, which leads to a modified diffusion loss. Our proposed framework, DiffEnc, achieves a statistically significant improvement in likelihood on CIFAR-10. Secondly, we let the ratio of the noise variance of the reverse encoder process and the generative process be a free weight parameter rather than being fixed to 1. This leads to theoretical insights: For a finite depth hierarchy, the evidence lower bound (ELBO) can be used as an objective for a weighted diffusion loss approach and for optimizing the noise schedule specifically for inference. For the infinite-depth hierarchy, on the other hand, the weight parameter has to be 1 to have a well-defined ELBO.
title DiffEnc: Variational Diffusion with a Learned Encoder
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.19789