Categorical Reparameterization with Denoising Diffusion models
Learning models with categorical variables requires optimizing expectations over discrete distributions, a setting in which stochastic gradient-based optimization is challenging due to the non-differentiability of categorical sampling. A common workaround is to replace the discrete distribution with a continuous relaxation, yielding a smooth surrogate that admits reparameterized gradient estimates via the reparameterization trick. Building on this idea, we introduce ReDGE, a novel and efficient diffusion-based soft reparameterization method for categorical distributions. Our approach defines a flexible class of gradient estimators that includes the Straight-Through estimator as a special case. Experiments spanning latent variable models and inference-time reward guidance in discrete diffusion models demonstrate that ReDGE consistently matches or outperforms existing gradient-based methods. The code will be made available at https://github.com/samsongourevitch/redge.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Argmax Flows and Multinomial Diffusion: Learning Categorical Distributions
Generative flows and diffusion models have been predominantly trained on ordinal data, for example natural images. This paper introduces two extensions of flows and diffusion for categorical data such as language or imag…
DenoisingImage SegmentationLanguage ModellingSegmentation+1MissHDD: Hybrid Deterministic Diffusion for Hetrogeneous Incomplete Data Imputation
Incomplete data are common in real-world tabular applications, where numerical, categorical, and discrete attributes coexist within a single dataset. This heterogeneous structure presents significant challenges for exist…
End-to-End Training for Back-Translation with Categorical Reparameterization Trick
Back-translation (BT) is an effective semi-supervised learning framework in neural machine translation (NMT). A pre-trained NMT model translates monolingual sentences and makes synthetic bilingual sentence pairs for the …
Machine TranslationNMTSentenceTranslationVector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis
We present the vector quantized diffusion (VQ-Diffusion) model for text-to-image generation. This method is based on a vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) whose latent space is modeled by a conditional vari…
DenoisingImage GenerationText to Image GenerationText-to-Image GenerationCategorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax
Categorical variables are a natural choice for representing discrete structure in the world. However, stochastic neural networks rarely use categorical latent variables due to the inability to backpropagate through sampl…
General Classification