English

Structured Diffusion Bridges: Inductive Bias for Denoising Diffusion Bridges

Machine Learning 2026-05-13 v3 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Modality translation is inherently under-constrained, as multiple cross-modal mappings may yield the same marginals. Recent work has shown that diffusion bridges are effective for this task. However, most existing approaches rely on fully paired datasets, thereby imposing a single data-driven constraint. We propose a diffusion-bridge framework that characterizes the space of admissible solutions and restricts it via alignment constraints, treating paired supervision as an optional heuristic rather than a prerequisite. We validate our method on synthetic and real modality translation benchmarks across unpaired, semi-paired, and paired regimes, showing consistent performance across supervision levels. Notably, \textbf{it achieves near fully-paired quality with a substantial relaxation in pairing requirements, and remaining applicable in the unpaired regime}. These results highlight diffusion bridges as a flexible foundation for modality translation beyond fully paired data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.02973,
  title  = {Structured Diffusion Bridges: Inductive Bias for Denoising Diffusion Bridges},
  author = {Eitan Kosman and Gabriele Serussi and Chaim Baskin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.02973},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to ICML 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:49:10.787Z