Conservation Laws for Diffusion Models

Abstract

While autoregressive models optimize the exact data likelihood via the chain rule, diffusion models are typically trained with denoising objectives. We develop conservation laws based on generalized extrinsic information transfer (GEXIT) functions for a broad class of memoryless noise processes, showing that the data--model cross-entropy (CE) can be characterized exactly as an integral of local information-theoretic derivatives along the noise path. This yields a unified characterization of the likelihood for discrete and continuous diffusion, with the Gaussian case reducing to the well-known mutual information--minimum mean-square error (I-MMSE) relationship. An immediate implication is a locality property: one can compute the information-theoretic derivatives using only the marginal posteriors along the noise path. As a result, training reduces to learning the marginal posteriors by minimizing the negative log-likelihood. While the conservation law implies that the entropy does not depend on the noise path, finite-capacity denoisers approximate the posteriors with varying accuracy across noise types, leading to differences in performance. We validate these predictions on synthetic Markov sources and standard benchmarks, including text8 and CIFAR-10.