2023/07/04 by Weijian Luo, Hao Jiang, Luo, Weijian +9
Computer Science · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Neuroimaging Techniques and Applications #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Model Reduction and Neural Networks
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2307.01668
openalex publication_date 2023/07/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Energy-Based Models (EBMs) have been widely used for generative modeling. Contrastive Divergence (CD), a prevailing training objective for EBMs, requires sampling from the EBM with Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods (MCMCs), which leads to an irreconcilable trade-off between the computational burden and the validity of the CD. Running MCMCs till convergence is computationally intensive. On the other hand, short-run MCMC brings in an extra non-negligible parameter gradient term that is difficult to handle. In this paper, we provide a general interpretation of CD, viewing it as a special instance of our proposed Diffusion Contrastive Divergence (DCD) family. By replacing the Langevin dynamic used in CD with other EBM-parameter-free diffusion processes, we propose a more efficient divergence. We show that the proposed DCDs are both more computationally efficient than the CD and are not limited to a non-negligible gradient term. We conduct intensive experiments, including both synthesis data modeling and high-dimensional image denoising and generation, to show the advantages of the proposed DCDs. On the synthetic data learning and image denoising experiments, our proposed DCD outperforms CD by a large margin. In image generation experiments, the proposed DCD is capable of training an energy-based model for generating the Celab-A 32× 32 dataset, which is comparable to existing EBMs.