Wasserstein bounds for denoising diffusion probabilistic models via the Föllmer process

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Koike, Yuta
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Koike, Yuta
author_facet Koike, Yuta
contents This paper studies sampling error bounds for denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) in the 2-Wasserstein distance. Our contributions are threefold. (i) Under general Lipschitz-type conditions on the score function and for a broad class of variance schedules, including the cosine schedule, we establish sharp upper bounds that are optimal in both the dimension and the number of steps, and recover several sharp error bounds previously obtained in the literature. (ii) We prove that the same Lipschitz-type conditions, which encompass those commonly imposed on the (learned) score, imply a logarithmic Sobolev inequality and hence a quadratic transportation cost inequality for the DDPM. As a consequence, in settings covered by existing work, an optimal Wasserstein bound, up to a logarithmic factor, follows from the recently obtained sharp error bound in the Kullback-Leibler divergence under geometric-type variance schedules. (iii) We show that for general log-concave target distributions, the optimal Wasserstein error bound remains attainable even without a quadratic transportation cost inequality for the target. Our analysis is based on viewing the DDPM sampler as a discretization of the Föllmer process rather than the conventional reverse Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18069
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Wasserstein bounds for denoising diffusion probabilistic models via the Föllmer process
Koike, Yuta
Machine Learning
Probability
Statistics Theory
62E17, 65C05, 65C30
This paper studies sampling error bounds for denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) in the 2-Wasserstein distance. Our contributions are threefold. (i) Under general Lipschitz-type conditions on the score function and for a broad class of variance schedules, including the cosine schedule, we establish sharp upper bounds that are optimal in both the dimension and the number of steps, and recover several sharp error bounds previously obtained in the literature. (ii) We prove that the same Lipschitz-type conditions, which encompass those commonly imposed on the (learned) score, imply a logarithmic Sobolev inequality and hence a quadratic transportation cost inequality for the DDPM. As a consequence, in settings covered by existing work, an optimal Wasserstein bound, up to a logarithmic factor, follows from the recently obtained sharp error bound in the Kullback-Leibler divergence under geometric-type variance schedules. (iii) We show that for general log-concave target distributions, the optimal Wasserstein error bound remains attainable even without a quadratic transportation cost inequality for the target. Our analysis is based on viewing the DDPM sampler as a discretization of the Föllmer process rather than the conventional reverse Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process.
title Wasserstein bounds for denoising diffusion probabilistic models via the Föllmer process
topic Machine Learning
Probability
Statistics Theory
62E17, 65C05, 65C30
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18069