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Deep MMD Gradient Flow without adversarial training

Galashov, alexandre; De Bortoli, Valentin; Gretton, Arthur; (2025) Deep MMD Gradient Flow without adversarial training. In: Proceedings 13th International Conference on Learning Representations ICLR 2025. ICLR: Singapore, Singapore. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

We propose a gradient flow procedure for generative modeling by transporting particles from an initial source distribution to a target distribution, where the gradient field on the particles is given by a noise-adaptive Wasserstein Gradient of the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). The noise adaptive MMD is trained on data distributions corrupted by increasing levels of noise, obtained via a forward diffusion process, as commonly used in denoising diffusion probabilistic models. The result is a generalization of MMD Gradient Flow, which we call Diffusion-MMD-Gradient Flow or DMMD. The divergence training procedure is related to discriminator training in Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), but does not require adversarial training. We obtain competitive empirical performance in unconditional image generation on CIFAR10, MNIST, CELEB-A (64 x64) and LSUN Church (64 x 64). Furthermore, we demonstrate the validity of the approach when MMD is replaced by a lower bound on the KL divergence.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Deep MMD Gradient Flow without adversarial training
Event: The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations 2025
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Publisher version: https://openreview.net/forum?id=Pf85K2wtz8
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s), 2025. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords: Generative modeling, diffusion models, Wasserstein gradient flows, generative adversarial networks, discriminator flow
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Gatsby Computational Neurosci Unit
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10207678
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