通过匹配完整协方差,显著降低扩散模型路径误差。
The Value of Covariance Matching in Gaussian DDPMs and the Lanczos Sampler

- 提出全协方差匹配方法,突破传统方法的路径KL误差瓶颈。
- 路径KL误差从Ω(1/T)降至O(1/T²),提升采样精度。
- 引入无需训练的兰佐斯采样器,三步即可超越强基线模型。
高斯DDPM中的核心误差指标是精确反向过程与学习到的高斯反向过程之间的路径空间KL散度。该指标对分类器引导等扰动整个反向轨迹的方法尤为重要。先前分析表明,标准各向同性反向协方差在步骤数T增大时存在不可避免的Ω(1/T)路径KL误差。本文证明,匹配完整后验协方差可打破此瓶颈,使路径KL降至O(1/T²)。为实现全协方差匹配的实用性,提出兰佐斯高斯采样器(LGS),一种无需训练、无矩阵存储的采样方法,仅需后验均值的Jacobian-向量乘积即可生成最优反向协方差样本。理论证明,LGS近似误差随兰佐斯步数呈指数衰减,每步只需一次Jacobian-向量乘积。实验表明,仅用三步即在标准图像基准上优于包括OCM-DDPM在内的强基线模型,验证了全协方差匹配在理论与实践上的价值。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
A central error measure in Gaussian DDPMs is the path-space KL divergence between the exact reverse chain and the learned Gaussian reverse process. This quantity is especially relevant for procedures such as classifier guidance, which perturb the entire reverse trajectory rather than only the terminal sample. Prior analyses show that standard isotropic reverse covariances suffer an unavoidable $Ω(1/T)$ path-KL error as the number of denoising steps $T$ grows. We show that matching the full posterior covariance breaks this barrier, yielding an order-wise improvement that reduces the path KL to $O(1/T^2)$. To make full covariance matching practical, we introduce the Lanczos Gaussian sampler (LGS), a training-free, matrix-free method for sampling from the optimal reverse covariance using only covariance-vector products, which are available through Jacobian-vector products of the posterior mean. LGS avoids dense covariance storage and auxiliary covariance models. We prove that LGS approximation error decays exponentially in the number of Lanczos steps, where each Lanczos step requires a single Jacobian-vector product. Empirically, using only just three such steps improves sample quality over strong diagonal-covariance baselines, including OCM-DDPM, across standard image benchmarks. This identifies full covariance matching as both theoretically valuable and practically accessible for fast DDPM sampling.
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