Feynman-Kac Correctors in Diffusion: Annealing, Guidance, and Product of
  Experts
Authors: name: Marta Skreta; name: Tara Akhound-Sadegh; name: Viktor Ohanesian; name: Roberto Bondesan; name: Alán Aspuru-Guzik; name: Arnaud Doucet; name: Rob Brekelmans; name: Alexander Tong; name: Kirill Neklyudov
Published: 2025-03-04 17:46:51

Abstract: While score-based generative models are the model of choice across diverse
domains, there are limited tools available for controlling inference-time
behavior in a principled manner, e.g. for composing multiple pretrained models.
Existing classifier-free guidance methods use a simple heuristic to mix
conditional and unconditional scores to approximately sample from conditional
distributions. However, such methods do not approximate the intermediate
distributions, necessitating additional 'corrector' steps. In this work, we
provide an efficient and principled method for sampling from a sequence of
annealed, geometric-averaged, or product distributions derived from pretrained
score-based models. We derive a weighted simulation scheme which we call
Feynman-Kac Correctors (FKCs) based on the celebrated Feynman-Kac formula by
carefully accounting for terms in the appropriate partial differential
equations (PDEs). To simulate these PDEs, we propose Sequential Monte Carlo
(SMC) resampling algorithms that leverage inference-time scaling to improve
sampling quality. We empirically demonstrate the utility of our methods by
proposing amortized sampling via inference-time temperature annealing,
improving multi-objective molecule generation using pretrained models, and
improving classifier-free guidance for text-to-image generation. Our code is
available at https://github.com/martaskrt/fkc-diffusion.