Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models

Score-based generative models can produce high quality image samples comparable to GANs, without requiring adversarial optimization. However, existing training procedures are limited to images of low resolution (typically below 32 × 32), and can be unstable under some settings. We provide a new theoretical analysis of learning and sampling from score-based models in high dimensional spaces, explaining existing failure modes and motivating new solutions that generalize across datasets. To enhance stability, we also propose to maintain an exponential moving average of model weights. With these improvements, we can scale scorebased generative models to various image datasets, with diverse resolutions ranging from 64 × 64 to 256 × 256. Our score-based models can generate high-fidelity samples that rival best-in-class GANs on various image datasets, including CelebA, FFHQ, and several LSUN categories. 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020),