Xinhe Mu | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Score Approximation for Diffusion Models on Arbitrary Low-Dimensional Structures

The remarkable success of score-based diffusion models has spurred significant efforts to establish their theoretical foundations. However, existing complexity bounds for score approximation rely heavily on restrictive assumptions like Lipschitz continuous densities or smooth manifold supports, which are routinely violated by the singularities, sharp boundaries, and disjoint clusters inherent to real-world perceptual data. This work establishes a universal score approximation theorem that works for any distribution supported on any compact set of upper Minkowski dimension $d$. Using a novel discrete-mixture formulation, we prove that the score function can be approximated with a ReLU network whose complexity grows exponentially only with $d$, thus breaking the exponential curse of ambient dimensionality. Combined with existing theories on accurately solving the backward diffusion SDE for arbitrary compact distributions, our work shows that diffusion models readily adapt to irregular, non-smooth data structures, explaining their competence in real-world generative tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Downsizing Diffusion Models for Cardinality Estimation

Learned cardinality estimation requires accurate model designs to capture the local characteristics of probability distributions. However, existing models may fail to accurately capture complex, multilateral dependencies between attributes. Diffusion models, meanwhile, can succeed in estimating image distributions with thousands of dimensions, making them promising candidates, but their heavy weight and high latency prohibit effective implementation. We seek to make diffusion models more lightweight by introducing Accelerated Diffusion Cardest (ADC), the first "downsized" diffusion model framework for efficient, high-precision cardinality estimation. ADC utilizes a hybrid architecture that integrates a Gaussian Mixture-Bayesnet selectivity estimator with a score-based density estimator to perform precise Monte Carlo integration. Addressing the issue of prohibitive inference latencies common in large generative models, we provide theoretical advancements concerning the asymptotic behavior of score functions as time $t$ approaches zero and convergence rate estimates as $t$ increases, enabling the adaptation of score-based diffusion models to the moderate dimensionalities and stringent latency requirements of database systems. Through experiments conducted against five learned estimators, including the state-of-the-art Naru, we demonstrate that ADC offer superior robustness when handling datasets with multilateral dependencies, which cannot be effectively summarized using pairwise or triple-wise correlations. In fact, ADC is 10 times more accurate than Naru on such datasets. Additionally, ADC achieves competitive accuracy comparable to Naru across all tested datasets while maintaining latency half that of Naru's and requiring minimal storage (<350KB) on most datasets.

cs.DB↗