Dimension-Free Convergence of Diffusion Models for Approximate Gaussian Mixtures

Abstract

Diffusion models are distinguished by their exceptional generative performance, particularly in producing high-quality samples through iterative denoising. While current theory suggests that the number of denoising steps required for accurate sample generation should scale linearly with data dimension, this does not reflect the practical efficiency of widely used algorithms like Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs). This paper investigates the effectiveness of diffusion models in sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions that can be well-approximated by Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). For these distributions, our main result shows that DDPM takes at most $\widetilde{O}(1/\varepsilon)$ iterations to attain an $\varepsilon$-accurate distribution in total variation (TV) distance, independent of both the ambient dimension $d$ and the number of components $K$, up to logarithmic factors. Furthermore, this result remains robust to score estimation errors. These findings highlight the remarkable effectiveness of diffusion models in high-dimensional settings given the universal approximation capability of GMMs, and provide theoretical insights into their practical success.