On the Separability of Information in Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Premkumar, Akhil
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866911410197364736
author Premkumar, Akhil
author_facet Premkumar, Akhil
contents Diffusion models transform noise into data by injecting information that was captured in their neural network during the training phase. In this paper, we ask: \textit{what} is this information? We find that, in pixel-space diffusion models, (1) a large fraction of the total information in the neural network is committed to reconstructing small-scale perceptual details of the image, and (2) the correlations between images and their class labels are informed by the semantic content of the images, and are largely agnostic to the low-level details. We argue that these properties are intrinsically tied to the manifold structure of the data itself. Finally, we show that these facts explain the efficacy of classifier-free guidance: the guidance vector amplifies the mutual information between images and conditioning signals early in the generative process, influencing semantic structure, but tapers out as perceptual details are filled in.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23937
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Separability of Information in Diffusion Models
Premkumar, Akhil
Machine Learning
Statistical Mechanics
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
Diffusion models transform noise into data by injecting information that was captured in their neural network during the training phase. In this paper, we ask: \textit{what} is this information? We find that, in pixel-space diffusion models, (1) a large fraction of the total information in the neural network is committed to reconstructing small-scale perceptual details of the image, and (2) the correlations between images and their class labels are informed by the semantic content of the images, and are largely agnostic to the low-level details. We argue that these properties are intrinsically tied to the manifold structure of the data itself. Finally, we show that these facts explain the efficacy of classifier-free guidance: the guidance vector amplifies the mutual information between images and conditioning signals early in the generative process, influencing semantic structure, but tapers out as perceptual details are filled in.
title On the Separability of Information in Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Statistical Mechanics
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23937