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Optimizing Input of Denoising Score Matching is Biased Towards Higher Score Norm

Machine Learning 2025-11-18 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Many recent works utilize denoising score matching to optimize the conditional input of diffusion models. In this workshop paper, we demonstrate that such optimization breaks the equivalence between denoising score matching and exact score matching. Furthermore, we show that this bias leads to higher score norm. Additionally, we observe a similar bias when optimizing the data distribution using a pre-trained diffusion model. Finally, we discuss the wide range of works across different domains that are affected by this bias, including MAR for auto-regressive generation, PerCo for image compression, and DreamFusion for text to 3D generation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.11727,
  title  = {Optimizing Input of Denoising Score Matching is Biased Towards Higher Score Norm},
  author = {Tongda Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.11727},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

NIPS 25 Workshop: Frontiers in Probabilistic Inference: Sampling Meets Learning