Ahmad Aghapour

Ahmad Aghapour, Erhan Bayraktar, Asaf Cohen

We study zero-shot conditional sampling with pretrained diffusion models for linear inverse problems, including inpainting and super-resolution. In these problems, the observation determines only part of the unknown signal. The remaining degrees of freedom must be sampled according to the correct conditional data distribution. Existing projection-based samplers enforce measurement consistency by correcting the observed component during reverse diffusion. However, measurement consistency alone does not determine how probability mass should be distributed along the feasible set, and this can lead to biased conditional samples. We analyze this issue through a normal--tangent decomposition of the score function. For Gaussian noising, the observed-direction score is exactly determined by the measurement; only the tangent conditional score is unknown. We prove that the error from replacing this score by the unconditional tangent score is upper bounded by a dimension-free conditional mutual information between observed and unobserved components. This gives an information-theoretic decomposition into initialization and pathwise score-mismatch errors. Motivated by the theory, we propose a projected-Langevin initialization followed by guided reverse denoising, which outperforms a strong projection-based baseline in inpainting and super-resolution experiments.

Ahmad Aghapour, Erhan Bayraktar

Diffusion models perform remarkably well on high-dimensional data such as images, often using only a modest number of reverse-time steps. Despite this practical success, existing convergence theory does not fully explain why such samplers remain efficient in high dimensions. Many prior KL guarantees bound the discretization error in terms of the ambient dimension, while other improved results replace this dependence using intrinsic-dimensional or geometric structure assumptions. In this work, we develop an alternative information-theoretic perspective on diffusion sampler convergence. We prove that, for Gaussian mixture targets, the discretization error is controlled by the Shannon entropy of the latent mixture component rather than by the ambient dimension. Consequently, the leading step complexity scales linearly with latent entropy and depends only logarithmically on the second moment of the data. Our analysis also extends to discrete target distributions, where the relevant complexity is the entropy of the target rather than the dimension of the embedding space. These results suggest that diffusion sampling can remain efficient in high-dimensional spaces when the data distribution admits a compact latent representation, as is widely believed to be the case for natural images.

Ahmad Aghapour, Erhan Bayraktar, Ziqing Zhang

Diffusion generative models synthesize samples by discretizing reverse-time dynamics driven by a learned score (or denoiser). Existing convergence analyses of diffusion models typically scale at least linearly with the ambient dimension, and sharper rates often depend on intrinsic-dimension assumptions or other geometric restrictions on the target distribution. We develop an alternative, information-theoretic approach to dimension-free convergence that avoids any geometric assumptions. Under mild assumptions on the target distribution, we bound KL divergence between the target and generated distributions by $O(H^2/K)$ (up to endpoint factors), where $H$ is the Shannon entropy and $K$ is the number of sampling steps. Moreover, using a reformulation of the KL divergence, we propose a Loss-Adaptive Schedule (LAS) for efficient discretization of reverse SDE which is lightweight and relies only on the training loss, requiring no post-training heavy computation. Empirically, LAS improves sampling quality over common heuristic schedules.