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arXiv · 2610.21061

Score Mismatch and Set-Constrained Sampling in Zero-Shot Conditional Discrete Diffusion

Renxiang Huang·Yuchen Liang·Yingbin Liang·Ness Shroff·Lifeng Lai
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Abstract

Discrete diffusion models have become a powerful framework for modeling complex discrete distributions across a range of applications. While theoretical convergence guarantees depend on consistency between the target and training distributions, such a case rarely holds in practice, making score mismatch a central challenge in discrete diffusion sampling. This is particularly relevant to zero-shot conditional generation, where a model trained on the unconditional distribution is directly reused at inference time to sample from a conditional target distribution. In this paper, we provide the first theoretical analysis for score-mismatched discrete diffusion models and derive a general KL divergence upper bound that clearly identifies the additional bias caused by such a mismatch. Our analysis covers partial-observation constraints, including text infilling, sentence completion, and more general coordinatewise set constraints. Specifically, we analyze the classical Conditional SEDD sampler and show that it can incur a bias term that scales with the dimension, vocabulary size, and compatibility. Based on this analysis, we propose a Randomized Hard Clamping (RHC) sampler for coordinatewise set constraints. We show that the assignment probabilities can be expressed exactly by the unconditional scores with absorbing rate. Finally, numerical and real-data experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RHC sampler.

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Renxiang Huang, Yuchen Liang, Yingbin Liang, Ness Shroff, Lifeng Lai. 2026-10-15. Score Mismatch and Set-Constrained Sampling in Zero-Shot Conditional Discrete Diffusion. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21061

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