Diffusion-Based Hypothesis Testing and Change-Point Detection

30 Apr 2026 (modified: 06 May 2026)Under review for TMLREveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Score-based methods have recently seen increasing popularity in modeling and generation. Methods have been constructed to perform hypothesis testing and change-point detection with score functions, but these methods are in general not as powerful as their likelihood-based peers. Recent works consider generalizing the score-based Fisher divergence into a diffusion-divergence by transforming score functions via multiplication with a matrix-valued function or a weight matrix. In this paper, we extend the score-based hypothesis test and change-point detection stopping rule into their diffusion-based analogs. Additionally, we theoretically quantify the performance of these diffusion-based algorithms and study scenarios where optimal performance is achievable. We propose a method of numerically optimizing the weight matrix and present numerical simulations to illustrate the advantages of diffusion-based algorithms.
Submission Type: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)
Assigned Action Editor: ~Matthew_J._Holland1
Submission Number: 8686
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