Seasoning Generative Models for a Generalization Aftertaste

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Husain, Hisham, De Bortoli, Valentin, Nock, Richard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917353224142848
author Husain, Hisham
De Bortoli, Valentin
Nock, Richard
author_facet Husain, Hisham
De Bortoli, Valentin
Nock, Richard
contents The use of discriminators to train or fine-tune generative models has proven to be a rather successful framework. A notable example is Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that minimize a loss incurred by training discriminators along with other paradigms that boost generative models via discriminators that satisfy weak learner constraints. More recently, even diffusion models have shown advantages with some kind of discriminator guidance. In this work, we extend a strong-duality result related to $f$-divergences which gives rise to a discriminator-guided recipe that allows us to \textit{refine} any generative model. We then show that the refined generative models provably improve generalization, compared to its non-refined counterpart. In particular, our analysis reveals that the gap in generalization is improved based on the Rademacher complexity of the discriminator set used for refinement. Our recipe subsumes a recently introduced score-based diffusion approach (Kim et al., 2022) that has shown great empirical success, however allows us to shed light on the generalization guarantees of this method by virtue of our analysis. Thus, our work provides a theoretical validation for existing work, suggests avenues for new algorithms, and contributes to our understanding of generalization in generative models at large.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_18817
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Seasoning Generative Models for a Generalization Aftertaste
Husain, Hisham
De Bortoli, Valentin
Nock, Richard
Machine Learning
I.2.6
The use of discriminators to train or fine-tune generative models has proven to be a rather successful framework. A notable example is Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that minimize a loss incurred by training discriminators along with other paradigms that boost generative models via discriminators that satisfy weak learner constraints. More recently, even diffusion models have shown advantages with some kind of discriminator guidance. In this work, we extend a strong-duality result related to $f$-divergences which gives rise to a discriminator-guided recipe that allows us to \textit{refine} any generative model. We then show that the refined generative models provably improve generalization, compared to its non-refined counterpart. In particular, our analysis reveals that the gap in generalization is improved based on the Rademacher complexity of the discriminator set used for refinement. Our recipe subsumes a recently introduced score-based diffusion approach (Kim et al., 2022) that has shown great empirical success, however allows us to shed light on the generalization guarantees of this method by virtue of our analysis. Thus, our work provides a theoretical validation for existing work, suggests avenues for new algorithms, and contributes to our understanding of generalization in generative models at large.
title Seasoning Generative Models for a Generalization Aftertaste
topic Machine Learning
I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18817