Don’t Be so Negative! Score-Based Generative Modeling with Oracle-Assisted Guidance

Abstract

Score-based diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models, widely utilized across diverse domains. Despite significant advancements in large-scale tasks such as text-to-image generation, their application to constrained domains has received considerably less attention. This work addresses model learning in a setting where, in addition to the training dataset, there further exists side-information in the form of an oracle that can label samples as being outside the support of the true data generating distribution. Specifically we develop a new denoising diffusion probabilistic modeling methodology, Gen-neG, that leverages this additional side-information. Gen-neG builds on classifier guidance in diffusion models to guide the generation process towards the positive support region indicated by the oracle. We empirically establish the utility of Gen-neG in applications including collision avoidance in self-driving simulators and safety-guarded human motion generation.