Although Diffusion Model is a new generative framework, it still has many shades of other methods. Bayes’ rule is all you need Generation & Diffusion Just like GANs realized the implicit generation through the mapping from a random gaussian vector to a natural image, Diffusion Model is doing the same thing, by multiple mappings, though. This generation can be defined as the following Markov chain with learnable Gaussian transitions:

Both likelihood-based methods and GAN methods have have some intrinsic limitations. Learning and estimating Stein score (the gradient of the log-density function $\nabla_{ x} \log p_{\text {data }}( x)$) may be a better choice than learning the data density directly. Score Estimation (for training) We want to train a network $s_{\theta}(x)$ to estimate $\nabla_{ x} \log p_{\text {data }}( x)$, but how can we get the ground truth (the real score)?