The paper investigates training diffusion models to sample from distributions defined by unnormalized densities or energy functions. It benchmarks various diffusion-structured inference techniques, including simulation-based variational methods and off-policy approaches such as continuous generative flow networks, highlighting their relative strengths and challenging some prior claims. Additionally, the authors introduce a new exploration strategy for off-policy methods that employs local search in the target space with a replay buffer, demonstrating improved sample quality across multiple target distributions.
By Marcin Sendera, Minsu Kim, Sarthak Mittal, Pablo Lemos, Luca Scimeca, Jarrid Rector-Brooks, Alexandre Adam, Yoshua Bengio, Esmeralda S. Whitammer
arXiv:2606. 01645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as a leading framework for deep generative modeling.
By Keito Wakatsuki, Hideaki Shimazaki
arXiv:2606. 23920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The task of compositional generation involves using a conditional generative model, trained only on a subset of the possible conditions, to produce samples from compositionally-defined target distributions such as a geometric combination of the source distributions.
By Duncan Soiffer, Chandler Squires, Yuan Guan, Jason Hartford, Pradeep Ravikumar
arXiv:2607. 19332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models have undergone many generations of evolution, from VAEs/GANs to diffusion/flow matching.
By Chirag Vashist, Ke Li
arXiv:2607. 10810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep generative models are increasingly used as simulators for downstream decision-making under data scarcity, but in risk-sensitive applications their usefulness depends on rare adverse scenarios rather than typical samples.
By Shuning Zhao, Patrick Wong, Leran Zhang, Xiaolin Hu
arXiv:2310. 05264v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we investigate an intriguing and prevalent phenomenon of diffusion models which we term as "consistent model reproducibility": given the same starting noise input and a deterministic sampler, different diffusion models often yield remarkably similar outputs.
By Huijie Zhang, Jinfan Zhou, Yifu Lu, Minzhe Guo, Peng Wang, Liyue Shen, Qing Qu
arXiv:2502. 04646v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Weighted sampling -- sampling from a probability density function (PDF) proportional to the product of a base PDF and a weight function -- is a fundamental technique with wide-ranging applications in variance reduction, biased sampling, data augmentation, and more.
By Heasung Kim, Taekyun Lee, Hyeji Kim, Gustavo de Veciana
Generative models have undergone many generations of evolution, from VAEs/GANs to diffusion/flow matching. Along the way, the underlying techniques have become more complicated and various beliefs about what drives strong empirical performance have taken hold.
arXiv:2609.06761v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: While diffusion models excel at capturing complex data distributions, scientific discovery often requires steering generation toward specific, uncharac...
By Binglin Ji, Anindya Sarkar, Hengchang Lu, Lecheng Kong, Yixin Chen, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
arXiv:2606. 30574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many modern generative modeling methods, including diffusion models, normalizing flows, and flow matching, estimate transport maps or plans between distributions without explicitly targeting an optimal transport (OT) map.
By Sivaraman Balakrishnan
arXiv:2602. 02908v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion models trained on different, non-overlapping subsets of a dataset often produce strikingly similar outputs when given the same noise seed.
By Binxu Wang, Jacob Zavatone-Veth, Cengiz Pehlevan
arXiv:2607. 14398v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constrained generative models aim to produce samples that satisfy complex feasibility constraints while remaining faithful to the data distribution.
By Xiaoxuan Liang, Saeid Naderiparizi, Berend Zwartsenberg, Frank Wood