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Main Authors: Gottwald, Georg A., Liu, Shuigen, Marzouk, Youssef, Reich, Sebastian, Tong, Xin T.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04417
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author Gottwald, Georg A.
Liu, Shuigen
Marzouk, Youssef
Reich, Sebastian
Tong, Xin T.
author_facet Gottwald, Georg A.
Liu, Shuigen
Marzouk, Youssef
Reich, Sebastian
Tong, Xin T.
contents Diffusion models are state-of-the-art tools for various generative tasks. Yet training these models involves estimating high-dimensional score functions, which in principle suffers from the curse of dimensionality. It is therefore important to understand how low-dimensional structure in the target distribution can be exploited in these models. Here we consider locality structure, which describes certain sparse conditional dependencies among the target random variables. Given some locality structure, the score function is effectively low-dimensional, so that it can be estimated by a localized neural network with significantly reduced sample complexity. This observation motivates the localized diffusion model, where a localized score matching loss is used to train the score function within a localized hypothesis space. We prove that such localization enables diffusion models to circumvent the curse of dimensionality, at the price of additional localization error. Under realistic sample size scaling, we then show both theoretically and numerically that a moderate localization radius can balance the statistical and localization errors, yielding better overall performance. Localized structure also facilitates parallel training, making localized diffusion models potentially more efficient for large-scale applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_04417
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Localized Diffusion Models
Gottwald, Georg A.
Liu, Shuigen
Marzouk, Youssef
Reich, Sebastian
Tong, Xin T.
Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
Diffusion models are state-of-the-art tools for various generative tasks. Yet training these models involves estimating high-dimensional score functions, which in principle suffers from the curse of dimensionality. It is therefore important to understand how low-dimensional structure in the target distribution can be exploited in these models. Here we consider locality structure, which describes certain sparse conditional dependencies among the target random variables. Given some locality structure, the score function is effectively low-dimensional, so that it can be estimated by a localized neural network with significantly reduced sample complexity. This observation motivates the localized diffusion model, where a localized score matching loss is used to train the score function within a localized hypothesis space. We prove that such localization enables diffusion models to circumvent the curse of dimensionality, at the price of additional localization error. Under realistic sample size scaling, we then show both theoretically and numerically that a moderate localization radius can balance the statistical and localization errors, yielding better overall performance. Localized structure also facilitates parallel training, making localized diffusion models potentially more efficient for large-scale applications.
title Localized Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04417