Score Normalization for a Faster Diffusion Exponential Integrator Sampler

NeurIPS ’23 Diffusion Model Workshop
Diffusion
Generative Models
Theory
Authors
Affiliations

Guoxuan Xia

Imperial College London, UK

Duolikun Danier

University of Bristol, UK

Ayan Das

MediaTek Research UK

Stathi Fotiadis

MediaTek Research UK

Imperial College London, UK

Farhang Nabiei

MediaTek Research UK

Ushnish Sengupta

MediaTek Research UK

Alberto Bernacchia

MediaTek Research UK

Published

November 1, 2023

Paper (axXiv) Code

Asbtract

Recently, Zhang and Chen (2023) have proposed the Diffusion Exponential Integrator Sampler (DEIS) for fast generation of samples from Diffusion Models. It leverages the semi-linear nature of the probability flow ordinary differential equation (ODE) in order to greatly reduce integration error and improve generation quality at low numbers of function evaluations (NFEs). Key to this approach is the score function reparameterisation, which reduces the integration error incurred from using a fixed score function estimate over each integration step. The original authors use the default parameterisation used by models trained for noise prediction – multiply the score by the standard deviation of the conditional forward noising distribution. We find that although the mean absolute value of this score parameterisation is close to constant for a large portion of the reverse sampling process, it changes rapidly at the end of sampling. As a simple fix, we propose to instead reparameterise the score (at inference) by dividing it by the average absolute value of previous score estimates at that time step collected from offline high NFE generations. We find that our score normalisation (DEIS-SN) consistently improves FID compared to vanilla DEIS, showing an FID improvement from 6.44 to 5.57 at 10 NFEs for our CIFAR-10 experiments.

Zhang, Qinsheng, and Yongxin Chen. 2023. “Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models with Exponential Integrator.” In International Conference on Learning Representations.

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@inproceedings{xia2023,
  author = {Xia, Guoxuan and Danier, Duolikun and Das, Ayan and
    Fotiadis, Stathi and Nabiei, Farhang and Sengupta, Ushnish and
    Bernacchia, Alberto},
  title = {Score {Normalization} for a {Faster} {Diffusion}
    {Exponential} {Integrator} {Sampler}},
  booktitle = {NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Diffusion Models},
  date = {2023-11-01},
  url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=AQvPfN33g9},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Xia, Guoxuan, Duolikun Danier, Ayan Das, Stathi Fotiadis, Farhang Nabiei, Ushnish Sengupta, and Alberto Bernacchia. 2023. “Score Normalization for a Faster Diffusion Exponential Integrator Sampler.” In NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Diffusion Models. https://openreview.net/forum?id=AQvPfN33g9.