The diffusion model has shown remarkable success in computer vision, but it remains unclear whether ODE-based probability flow or SDE-based diffusion models are superior and under what circumstances. Comparing the two is challenging due to dependencies on data distribution, score training, and other numerical factors. In this paper, we examine the problem mathematically by examining two limiting scenarios: the ODE case and the large diffusion case. We first introduce a pulse-shape error to perturb the score function and analyze error accumulation, with a generalization to arbitrary error. Our findings indicate that when the perturbation occurs at the end of the generative process, the ODE model outperforms the SDE model (with a large diffusion coefficient). However, when the perturbation occurs earlier, the SDE model outperforms the ODE model, and we demonstrate that the error of sample generation due to pulse-shape error can be exponentially suppressed as the diffusion term's magnitude increases to infinity. Numerical validation of this phenomenon is provided using toy models such as Gaussian, Gaussian mixture models, and Swiss roll. Finally, we experiment with MNIST and observe that varying the diffusion coefficient can improve sample quality even when the score function is not well trained.

本文主要研究了扩散模型在计算机视觉中的应用，比较和分析了基于ODE和SDE的概率流和扩散模型在不同情况下的性能差异，研究表明，对于特定的脉冲形状误差，扩散系数越大，使用SDE模型生成样本的误差就会指数级下降，并且变化扩散系数可以提高样本质量。

扩散模型生成过程最优选择的探索：普通微分方程与随机微分方程对比