Variance-Reduction Guidance: Sampling Trajectory Optimization for Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Shifeng, Liu, Yanzhu, Kong, Adams Wai-Kin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866909869667254272
author Xu, Shifeng
Liu, Yanzhu
Kong, Adams Wai-Kin
author_facet Xu, Shifeng
Liu, Yanzhu
Kong, Adams Wai-Kin
contents Diffusion models have become emerging generative models. Their sampling process involves multiple steps, and in each step the models predict the noise from a noisy sample. When the models make prediction, the output deviates from the ground truth, and we call such a deviation as \textit{prediction error}. The prediction error accumulates over the sampling process and deteriorates generation quality. This paper introduces a novel technique for statistically measuring the prediction error and proposes the Variance-Reduction Guidance (VRG) method to mitigate this error. VRG does not require model fine-tuning or modification. Given a predefined sampling trajectory, it searches for a new trajectory which has the same number of sampling steps but produces higher quality results. VRG is applicable to both conditional and unconditional generation. Experiments on various datasets and baselines demonstrate that VRG can significantly improve the generation quality of diffusion models. Source code is available at https://github.com/shifengxu/VRG.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_21792
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Variance-Reduction Guidance: Sampling Trajectory Optimization for Diffusion Models
Xu, Shifeng
Liu, Yanzhu
Kong, Adams Wai-Kin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Diffusion models have become emerging generative models. Their sampling process involves multiple steps, and in each step the models predict the noise from a noisy sample. When the models make prediction, the output deviates from the ground truth, and we call such a deviation as \textit{prediction error}. The prediction error accumulates over the sampling process and deteriorates generation quality. This paper introduces a novel technique for statistically measuring the prediction error and proposes the Variance-Reduction Guidance (VRG) method to mitigate this error. VRG does not require model fine-tuning or modification. Given a predefined sampling trajectory, it searches for a new trajectory which has the same number of sampling steps but produces higher quality results. VRG is applicable to both conditional and unconditional generation. Experiments on various datasets and baselines demonstrate that VRG can significantly improve the generation quality of diffusion models. Source code is available at https://github.com/shifengxu/VRG.
title Variance-Reduction Guidance: Sampling Trajectory Optimization for Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21792