Towards a Theoretical Understanding of Memorization in Diffusion Models

Yunhao Chen, Xingjun Ma, Difan Zou, Yu-Gang Jiang

Keywords: Diffusion Models Memorization; Diffusion Probabilistic models

Abstract: As diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) are being employed as mainstream models for Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), the study of their memorization of training data has attracted growing attention. Existing works in this direction aim to establish an understanding of whether or to what extent DPMs learn via memorization. Such an understanding is crucial for identifying potential risks of data leakage and copyright infringement in diffusion models and, more importantly, for trustworthy application of GenAI. Existing works revealed that conditional DPMs are more prone to training data memorization than unconditional DPMs, and the motivated data extraction methods are mostly for conditional DPMs. However, these understandings are primarily empirical, and extracting training data from unconditional models has been found to be extremely challenging. In this work, we provide a theoretical understanding of memorization in both conditional and unconditional DPMs under the assumption of model convergence. Our theoretical analysis indicates that extracting data from unconditional models can also be effective by constructing a proper surrogate condition. Based on this result, we propose a novel data extraction method named \textbf{Surrogate condItional Data Extraction (SIDE)} that leverages a time-dependent classifier trained on the generated data as a surrogate condition to extract training data from unconditional DPMs. Empirical results demonstrate that our SIDE can extract training data in challenging scenarios where previous methods fail, and it is, on average, over 50\% more effective across different scales of the CelebA dataset.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

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Submission Number: 3449