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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Schioppa, Andrea, Salimans, Tim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13910
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author Schioppa, Andrea
Salimans, Tim
author_facet Schioppa, Andrea
Salimans, Tim
contents We present a covariance-aware sampler that improves the quality of pixel-space Diffusion Model (DM) sampling in the few-step regime. We hypothesize that in the few-step regime samplers fail because they rely solely on the predicted mean of the reverse distribution, while our solution explicitly models the reverse-process covariance. Our method combines Tweedie's formula to estimate the covariance with an efficient, structured Fourier-space decomposition of the covariance matrix. Implemented as an extension of DDIM, our method requires only a minimal overhead: one extra Jacobian-Vector Product (JVP) per step. We demonstrate that for pixel-based DMs, our method consistently produces superior samples compared to state-of-the-art second order samplers (Heun, DPM-Solver++) and the recent aDDIM sampler, at an identical number of function evaluations (NFE).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13910
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Covariance-aware sampling for Diffusion Models
Schioppa, Andrea
Salimans, Tim
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We present a covariance-aware sampler that improves the quality of pixel-space Diffusion Model (DM) sampling in the few-step regime. We hypothesize that in the few-step regime samplers fail because they rely solely on the predicted mean of the reverse distribution, while our solution explicitly models the reverse-process covariance. Our method combines Tweedie's formula to estimate the covariance with an efficient, structured Fourier-space decomposition of the covariance matrix. Implemented as an extension of DDIM, our method requires only a minimal overhead: one extra Jacobian-Vector Product (JVP) per step. We demonstrate that for pixel-based DMs, our method consistently produces superior samples compared to state-of-the-art second order samplers (Heun, DPM-Solver++) and the recent aDDIM sampler, at an identical number of function evaluations (NFE).
title Covariance-aware sampling for Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13910