English
Related papers

Related papers: Measuring Sample Quality with Diffusions

200 papers

We provide new convergence guarantees in Wasserstein distance for diffusion-based generative models, covering both stochastic (DDPM-like) and deterministic (DDIM-like) sampling methods. We introduce a simple framework to analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Eliot Beyler , Francis Bach

Stein importance sampling is a widely applicable technique based on kernelized Stein discrepancy, which corrects the output of approximate sampling algorithms by reweighting the empirical distribution of the samples. A general analysis of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-09-14 Liam Hodgkinson , Robert Salomone , Fred Roosta

An Euler discretization of the Langevin diffusion is known to converge to the global minimizers of certain convex and non-convex optimization problems. We show that this property holds for any suitably smooth diffusion and that different…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-30 Murat A. Erdogdu , Lester Mackey , Ohad Shamir

We develop a variant of Stein's method of comparison of generators to bound the Kolmogorov, total variation, and Wasserstein-1 distances between distributions on the real line. Our discrepancy is expressed in terms of the ratio of reverse…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-10-28 Paul Mansanarez , Guillaume Poly , Yvik Swan

This paper studies the rate of convergence of a family of continuous-time Markov chains (CTMC) to a mean-field model. When the mean-field model is a finite-dimensional dynamical system with a unique equilibrium point, an analysis based on…

Performance · Computer Science 2015-10-06 Lei Ying

Diffusion models excel in generative tasks, but aligning them with specific objectives while maintaining their versatility remains challenging. Existing fine-tuning methods often suffer from reward over-optimization, while approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Sunwoo Kim , Minkyu Kim , Dongmin Park

In this article, we develop Stein characterization for two-sided tempered stable distribution. Stein characterizations for normal, gamma, Laplace, and variance-gamma distributions already known in the literature follow easily. One can also…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-01-06 Kalyan Barman , N. S. Upadhye

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a deterministic interacting-particle method for sampling from a target probability measure given access to its score function. In the mean-field and continuous-time limit, it is known that the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Lénaïc Chizat , Maria Colombo , Roberto Colombo , Xavier Fernández-Real

We present a framework for obtaining explicit bounds on the rate of convergence to equilibrium of a Markov chain on a general state space, with respect to both total variation and Wasserstein distances. For Wasserstein bounds, our main tool…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2011-02-28 Neal Madras , Deniz Sezer

In this article, we discuss the basic ideas of a general procedure to adapt the Stein-Chen method to bound the distance between conditional distributions. From an integration-by-parts formula (IBPF), we derive a Stein operator whose…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-10-25 Alberto Chiarini , Alessandra Cipriani , Giovanni Conforti

Score-based diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools in generative modeling, yet their theoretical foundations remain underexplored. In this work, we focus on the Wasserstein convergence analysis of score-based diffusion models.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-10 Yifeng Yu , Lu Yu

In this work, we are concerned with existence and uniqueness of invariant measures for path-dependent random diffusions and their time discretizations. The random diffusion here means a diffusion process living in a random environment…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-06-20 Jianhai Bao , Jinghai Shao , Chenggui Yuan

The efficiency of a Markov sampler based on the underdamped Langevin diffusion is studied for high dimensional targets with convex and smooth potentials. We consider a classical second-order integrator which requires only one gradient…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-06-21 Pierre Monmarché

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…

Computation · Statistics 2008-07-22 Ioana A. Cosma , Masoud Asgharian

We obtain explicit error bounds for the $d$-dimensional normal approximation on hyperrectangles for a random vector that has a Stein kernel, or admits an exchangeable pair coupling, or is a non-linear statistic of independent random…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-09-08 Xiao Fang , Yuta Koike

In extending Stein's method to new target distributions, the first step is to find a Stein operator that suitably characterises the target distribution. In this paper, we introduce a widely applicable technique for proving sufficiency of…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-12-14 Ehsan Azmoodeh , Dario Gasbarra , Robert E. Gaunt

Diffusion models have revolutionized various application domains, including computer vision and audio generation. Despite the state-of-the-art performance, diffusion models are known for their slow sample generation due to the extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Zehao Dou , Minshuo Chen , Mengdi Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) provides asymptotically consistent estimates of intractable posterior expectations as the number of iterations tends to infinity. However, in large data applications, MCMC can be computationally expensive per…

Computation · Statistics 2023-11-03 Niloy Biswas , Lester Mackey

We develop a multidimensional Stein methodology for non-degenerate self-decomposable random vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$ having finite first moment. Building on previous univariate findings, we solve an integro-partial differential Stein…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-04-08 Benjamin Arras , Christian Houdré

Markov chains can be used to generate samples whose distribution approximates a given target distribution. The quality of the samples of such Markov chains can be measured by the discrepancy between the empirical distribution of the samples…

Computation · Statistics 2016-01-18 Josef Dick , Daniel Rudolf , Houying Zhu