Denoising Diffusions with Optimal Transport: Localization, Curvature, and Multi-Scale Complexity

TMLR Paper5977 Authors

Abstract: Adding noise is easy; what about denoising? Diffusion is easy; what about reverting a diffusion? Diffusion-based generative models aim to denoise a Langevin diffusion chain, moving from a log-concave equilibrium measure $\nu$, say an isotropic Gaussian, back to a complex, possibly non-log-concave initial measure $\mu$. The score function performs denoising, moving backward in time, and predicting the conditional mean of the past location given the current one. We show that score denoising is the optimal backward map in transportation cost. What is its localization uncertainty? We show that the curvature function determines this localization uncertainty, measured as the conditional variance of the past location given the current. We study in this paper the effectiveness of the diffuse-then-denoise process: the contraction of the forward diffusion chain, offset by the possible expansion of the backward denoising chain, governs the denoising difficulty. For any initial measure $\mu$, we prove that this offset net contraction at time $t$ is characterized by the curvature complexity of a smoothed $\mu$ at a specific signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scale $r(t)$. We discover that the multi-scale curvature complexity collectively determines the difficulty of the denoising chain. Our multi-scale complexity quantifies a fine-grained notion of average-case curvature instead of the worst-case. Curiously, it depends on an integrated tail function, measuring the relative mass of locations with positive curvature versus those with negative curvature; denoising at a specific SNR scale is easy if such an integrated tail is light. We conclude with several non-log-concave examples to demonstrate how the multi-scale complexity probes the bottleneck SNR for the diffuse-then-denoise process.

Submission Length: Long submission (more than 12 pages of main content)

Changes Since Last Submission:

We revised the paper to incorporate the referees' suggestions.

- We added discussions to additional related work in Section 1.2. We discuss Bruno et al. (2023), Gao et al. (2025), Gentiloni-Silveri & Ocello (2025), Chen et al. (2023) and Benton et al. (2023).

- We clarified the presentation at points suggested by the referees and fixed typos.

- We discuss that our notion of average curvature is suited for the Wasserstein metric, and why it is different from the existing study in terms of the metric, the notion of curvature, as well as the technical analyses.

Assigned Action Editor: ~Gilles_Louppe1

Submission Number: 5977