<-- Go back

An optimal control perspective on diffusion-based generative modeling

by Julius Berner, Lorenz Richter, Karen Ullrich

Year:

2024

Publication:

eprint arXiv:2211.01364

Abstract:

We establish a connection between stochastic optimal control and generative models based on stochastic differential equations (SDEs), such as recently developed diffusion probabilistic models. In particular, we derive a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation that governs the evolution of the log-densities of the underlying SDE marginals. This perspective allows to transfer methods from optimal control theory to generative modeling. First, we show that the evidence lower bound is a direct consequence of the well-known verification theorem from control theory. Further, we can formulate diffusion-based generative modeling as a minimization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence between suitable measures in path space. Finally, we develop a novel diffusion-based method for sampling from unnormalized densities -- a problem frequently occurring in statistics and computational sciences. We demonstrate that our time-reversed diffusion sampler (DIS) can outperform other diffusion-based sampling approaches on multiple numerical examples.

Link:

Read the paper

Additional Information


Brief introduction of the dida co-author(s) and relevance for dida's ML developments.

About the Co-Author

With an original focus on stochastics and numerics (FU Berlin), the mathematician has been dealing with deep learning algorithms for some time now. Besides his interest in the theory, he has practically solved multiple data science problems in the last 10 years. Lorenz leads the machine learning team.