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Entropy-Based Dimension-Free Convergence and Loss-Adaptive Schedules for Diffusion Models

Machine Learning 2026-01-30 v1 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

Diffusion generative models synthesize samples by discretizing reverse-time dynamics driven by a learned score (or denoiser). Existing convergence analyses of diffusion models typically scale at least linearly with the ambient dimension, and sharper rates often depend on intrinsic-dimension assumptions or other geometric restrictions on the target distribution. We develop an alternative, information-theoretic approach to dimension-free convergence that avoids any geometric assumptions. Under mild assumptions on the target distribution, we bound KL divergence between the target and generated distributions by O(H2/K)O(H^2/K) (up to endpoint factors), where HH is the Shannon entropy and KK is the number of sampling steps. Moreover, using a reformulation of the KL divergence, we propose a Loss-Adaptive Schedule (LAS) for efficient discretization of reverse SDE which is lightweight and relies only on the training loss, requiring no post-training heavy computation. Empirically, LAS improves sampling quality over common heuristic schedules.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.21943,
  title  = {Entropy-Based Dimension-Free Convergence and Loss-Adaptive Schedules for Diffusion Models},
  author = {Ahmad Aghapour and Erhan Bayraktar and Ziqing Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.21943},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:26:03.527Z