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Hauptverfasser: Pfrommer, Daniel, Dou, Zehao, Scarvelis, Christopher, Simchowitz, Max, Jadbabaie, Ali
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18736
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author Pfrommer, Daniel
Dou, Zehao
Scarvelis, Christopher
Simchowitz, Max
Jadbabaie, Ali
author_facet Pfrommer, Daniel
Dou, Zehao
Scarvelis, Christopher
Simchowitz, Max
Jadbabaie, Ali
contents We study the inductive biases of diffusion models with a conditioning-variable, which have seen widespread application as both text-conditioned generative image models and observation-conditioned continuous control policies. We observe that when these models are queried conditionally, their generations consistently deviate from the idealized "denoising" process upon which diffusion models are formulated, inducing disagreement between popular sampling algorithms (e.g. DDPM, DDIM). We introduce Schedule Deviation, a rigorous measure which captures the rate of deviation from a standard denoising process, and provide a methodology to compute it. Crucially, we demonstrate that the deviation from an idealized denoising process occurs irrespective of the model capacity or amount of training data. We posit that this phenomenon occurs due to the difficulty of bridging distinct denoising flows across different parts of the conditioning space and show theoretically how such a phenomenon can arise through an inductive bias towards smoothness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_18736
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is Your Conditional Diffusion Model Actually Denoising?
Pfrommer, Daniel
Dou, Zehao
Scarvelis, Christopher
Simchowitz, Max
Jadbabaie, Ali
Machine Learning
We study the inductive biases of diffusion models with a conditioning-variable, which have seen widespread application as both text-conditioned generative image models and observation-conditioned continuous control policies. We observe that when these models are queried conditionally, their generations consistently deviate from the idealized "denoising" process upon which diffusion models are formulated, inducing disagreement between popular sampling algorithms (e.g. DDPM, DDIM). We introduce Schedule Deviation, a rigorous measure which captures the rate of deviation from a standard denoising process, and provide a methodology to compute it. Crucially, we demonstrate that the deviation from an idealized denoising process occurs irrespective of the model capacity or amount of training data. We posit that this phenomenon occurs due to the difficulty of bridging distinct denoising flows across different parts of the conditioning space and show theoretically how such a phenomenon can arise through an inductive bias towards smoothness.
title Is Your Conditional Diffusion Model Actually Denoising?
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18736