KL Convergence Guarantees for Score Diffusion Models under Minimal Data Assumptions

Source abstract

Abstract. Diffusion models are a new class of generative models that revolve around the estimation of the score function associated with an SDE. Subsequent to its acquisition, the approximated score function is then harnessed to simulate the corresponding time-reversal process, ultimately enabling the generation of approximate data samples. Despite their evident practical significance these models carry, a notable challenge persists in the form of a lack of comprehensive quantitative results, especially in scenarios involving nonregular scores and estimators. In almost all reported bounds in Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence, it is assumed that either the score function or its approximation is Lipschitz uniformly in time. However, this condition is very restrictive in practice or appears to be difficult to establish. To circumvent this issue, previous works mainly focused on establishing convergence bounds in KL for an early stopped version of the diffusion model and a smoothed version of the data distribution or assuming that the data distribution is supported on a compact manifold. These explorations have led to interesting bounds in either Wasserstein or Fortet–Mourier metrics. However, the question remains about the relevance of such an early stopping procedure or compactness conditions, in particular, if there exists a natural and mild condition ensuring explicit and sharp convergence bounds in KL. In this article, we tackle the aforementioned limitations by focusing on score diffusion models with fixed step size stemming from the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck semigroup and its kinetic counterpart. Our study provides a rigorous analysis, yielding simple, improved, and sharp convergence bounds in KL applicable to any data distribution with finite Fisher information with respect to the standard Gaussian distribution.