Title: Mitigating Noise Shift in Denoising Generative Models with Noise Awareness Guidance
Primary area: generative models
Keywords: diffusion models, generative models, training-inference misalignment, noise awareness, guidance

Abstract: Existing denoising generative models rely on solving discretized reverse-time SDEs or ODEs. In this paper, we identify a long-overlooked yet pervasive issue in this family of models: a misalignment between the pre-defined noise level and the actual noise level encoded in intermediate states during sampling. We refer to this misalignment as noise shift. Through empirical analysis, we demonstrate that noise shift is widespread in modern diffusion models and exhibits a systematic bias, leading to sub-optimal generation due to both out-of-distribution generalization and inaccurate denoising updates. To address this problem, we propose Noise Awareness Guidance (NAG), a simple yet effective correction method that explicitly steers sampling trajectories to remain consistent with the pre-defined noise schedule. We further introduce a classifier-free variant of NAG, which jointly trains a noise-conditional and a noise-unconditional model via noise-condition dropout, thereby eliminating the need for external classifiers. Extensive experiments, including ImageNet generation and various supervised fine-tuning tasks, show that NAG consistently mitigates noise shift and substantially improves the generation quality of mainstream diffusion models. Code will be released upon acceptance.

TL;DR: We identify a noise shift problem in diffusion models, where intermediate states deviate from the pre-defined noise schedule, and propose Noise Awareness Guidance (NAG) to correct it, significantly improving generation quality.