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Main Authors: Shen, Yirong, Gan, Lu, Ling, Cong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20903
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author Shen, Yirong
Gan, Lu
Ling, Cong
author_facet Shen, Yirong
Gan, Lu
Ling, Cong
contents Generative models that maximize model likelihood have gained traction in many practical settings. Among them, perturbation based approaches underpin many strong likelihood estimation models, yet they often face slow convergence and limited theoretical understanding. In this paper, we derive a tighter likelihood bound for noise driven models to improve both the accuracy and efficiency of maximum likelihood learning. Our key insight extends the classical KL divergence Fisher information relationship to arbitrary noise perturbations, going beyond the Gaussian assumption and enabling structured noise distributions. This formulation allows flexible use of randomized noise distributions that naturally account for sensor artifacts, quantization effects, and data distribution smoothing, while remaining compatible with standard diffusion training. Treating the diffusion process as a Gaussian channel, we further express the mismatched entropy between data and model, showing that the proposed objective upper bounds the negative log-likelihood (NLL). In experiments, our models achieve competitive NLL on CIFAR-10 and SOTA results on ImageNet across multiple resolutions, all without data augmentation, and the framework extends naturally to discrete data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_20903
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Information Theoretic Learning for Diffusion Models with Warm Start
Shen, Yirong
Gan, Lu
Ling, Cong
Information Theory
Machine Learning
Generative models that maximize model likelihood have gained traction in many practical settings. Among them, perturbation based approaches underpin many strong likelihood estimation models, yet they often face slow convergence and limited theoretical understanding. In this paper, we derive a tighter likelihood bound for noise driven models to improve both the accuracy and efficiency of maximum likelihood learning. Our key insight extends the classical KL divergence Fisher information relationship to arbitrary noise perturbations, going beyond the Gaussian assumption and enabling structured noise distributions. This formulation allows flexible use of randomized noise distributions that naturally account for sensor artifacts, quantization effects, and data distribution smoothing, while remaining compatible with standard diffusion training. Treating the diffusion process as a Gaussian channel, we further express the mismatched entropy between data and model, showing that the proposed objective upper bounds the negative log-likelihood (NLL). In experiments, our models achieve competitive NLL on CIFAR-10 and SOTA results on ImageNet across multiple resolutions, all without data augmentation, and the framework extends naturally to discrete data.
title Information Theoretic Learning for Diffusion Models with Warm Start
topic Information Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20903