Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lu, Haoye, Wu, Qifan, Yu, Yaoliang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05446
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912410383679488
author Lu, Haoye
Wu, Qifan
Yu, Yaoliang
author_facet Lu, Haoye
Wu, Qifan
Yu, Yaoliang
contents Recent diffusion-based generative models achieve remarkable results by training on massive datasets, yet this practice raises concerns about memorization and copyright infringement. A proposed remedy is to train exclusively on noisy data with potential copyright issues, ensuring the model never observes original content. However, through the lens of deconvolution theory, we show that although it is theoretically feasible to learn the data distribution from noisy samples, the practical challenge of collecting sufficient samples makes successful learning nearly unattainable. To overcome this limitation, we propose to pretrain the model with a small fraction of clean data to guide the deconvolution process. Combined with our Stochastic Forward--Backward Deconvolution (SFBD) method, we attain FID 6.31 on CIFAR-10 with just 4% clean images (and 3.58 with 10%). We also provide theoretical guarantees that SFBD learns the true data distribution. These results underscore the value of limited clean pretraining, or pretraining on similar datasets. Empirical studies further validate and enrich our findings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05446
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stochastic Forward-Backward Deconvolution: Training Diffusion Models with Finite Noisy Datasets
Lu, Haoye
Wu, Qifan
Yu, Yaoliang
Machine Learning
Recent diffusion-based generative models achieve remarkable results by training on massive datasets, yet this practice raises concerns about memorization and copyright infringement. A proposed remedy is to train exclusively on noisy data with potential copyright issues, ensuring the model never observes original content. However, through the lens of deconvolution theory, we show that although it is theoretically feasible to learn the data distribution from noisy samples, the practical challenge of collecting sufficient samples makes successful learning nearly unattainable. To overcome this limitation, we propose to pretrain the model with a small fraction of clean data to guide the deconvolution process. Combined with our Stochastic Forward--Backward Deconvolution (SFBD) method, we attain FID 6.31 on CIFAR-10 with just 4% clean images (and 3.58 with 10%). We also provide theoretical guarantees that SFBD learns the true data distribution. These results underscore the value of limited clean pretraining, or pretraining on similar datasets. Empirical studies further validate and enrich our findings.
title Stochastic Forward-Backward Deconvolution: Training Diffusion Models with Finite Noisy Datasets
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05446