From Denoising Diffusions to Denoising Markov Models

Denoising diffusions are state-of-the-art generative models which exhibit remarkable empirical performance and come with theoretical guarantees. The core idea of these models is to progressively transform the empirical data distribution into a simple Gaussian distribution by adding noise using a diffusion. We obtain new samples whose distribution is close to the data distribution by simulating a "denoising" diffusion approximating the time reversal of this "noising" diffusion. This denoising diffusion relies on approximations of the logarithmic derivatives of the noised data densities, known as scores, obtained using score matching. Such models can be easily extended to perform approximate posterior simulation in high-dimensional scenarios where one can only sample from the prior and simulate synthetic observations from the likelihood. These methods have been primarily developed for data on $\mathbb{R}^d$ while extensions to more general spaces have been developed on a case-by-case basis. We propose here a general framework which not only unifies and generalizes this approach to a wide class of spaces but also leads to an original extension of score matching. We illustrate the resulting class of denoising Markov models on various applications.