Foundations of Diffusion Models in General State Spaces: A Self-Contained Introduction
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The article "Foundations of Diffusion Models in General State Spaces: A Self-Contained Introduction" presents a unified primer on diffusion models that applies to both continuous Euclidean data and discrete categorical structures. It develops discrete-time forward noising via Markov kernels and learned reverse dynamics, and connects these to continuous-time limits such as stochastic differential equations in ρ^d and continuous-time Markov chains on finite alphabets, deriving the corresponding Fokker–Planck and master equations. The work also shows how different forward corruption choices—Gaussian processes for continuous spaces and structured categorical transition kernels for discrete spaces—affect reverse dynamics and the evidence lower bound used in training, offering a layered exposition for newcomers, practitioners, and experts alike.
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