论文

高斯桥回拉目标分布,改进扩散后验采样器 MCGDiff 的初始化策略

Direct Intermediate Initialization for Tilted Diffusion Samplers

精选理由

这篇论文改了 MCGDiff 的启动方式,用高斯桥把采样提前到中间时刻,粒子数不变的情况下误差降了约 2 倍,做扩散逆问题求解的可以看看。

论文针对扩散后验采样中的倾斜中间分布提出直接初始化方法:将噪声空间目标通过高斯桥回拉到干净空间的后验,条件强度更弱。作者以近似求解器对软化后的干净空间后验采样,再用高斯桥映射回倾斜目标,只运行剩余的 SMC 后缀过程。在 MCGDiff 上,以 MMPS 作为求解器的混合方法在粒子数相同的情况下,将 sliced Wasserstein 距离改善约 2 倍;当先验中后验相关模式较稀有时,改善超过一个数量级。消融实验显示标准高斯混合基准上的改进大部分不依赖条件化,但在稀疏模式问题上条件化起决定性作用。

原文 · arXiv cs.LG

Direct Intermediate Initialization for Tilted Diffusion Samplers

Some diffusion posterior samplers construct Gaussian-tilted intermediate distributions along the reverse process. We observe that these targets can be pulled back to clean-space posteriors with weaker conditioning, with samples transported analytically to the corresponding noisy-space target through a Gaussian bridge. For the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler MCGDiff, the effective observation variance of this pulled-back problem is up to twice the diffusion-noise variance. We exploit this structure to initialize MCGDiff directly at an intermediate time: an approximate solver samples the softened clean-space posterior, the Gaussian bridge maps these samples to the tilted target, and only the remaining SMC suffix is run. This trades asymptotic consistency for finite-particle performance. With moment-matching posterior sampling (MMPS) as the solver, the hybrid improves sliced Wasserstein distance by roughly $2\times$ at matched particle count on a structured Gaussian-mixture inverse problem, and by more than an order of magnitude when the posterior-relevant mode is rare under the prior. A prior-initialization control, which retains the bridge but drops the clean-space conditioning, shows that on MCGDiff's standard Gaussian-mixture benchmark most of the improvement is insensitive to the conditioning. Conditioning the initialization gives a further consistent gain on the structured problem, and becomes decisive on a rare-mode problem, where resampling cannot repopulate a mode absent from the initial population.