Studying Classifier(-Free) Guidance from a Classifier-Centric Perspective

Classifier-free guidance has become a staple for conditional generation with denoising diffusion models. However, a comprehensive understanding of classifier-free guidance is still missing. In this work, we carry out an empirical study to provide a fresh perspective on classifier-free guidance. Concretely, instead of solely focusing on classifier-free guidance, we trace back to the root, i.e., classifier guidance, pinpoint the key assumption for the derivation, and conduct a systematic study to understand the role of the classifier. On 1D data, we find that both classifier guidance and classifier-free guidance achieve conditional generation by pushing the denoising diffusion trajectories away from decision boundaries, i.e., areas where conditional information is usually entangled and is hard to learn. To validate this classifier-centric perspective on high-dimensional data, we assess whether a flow-matching postprocessing step that is designed to narrow the gap between a pre-trained diffusion model’s learned distribution and the real data distribution, especially near decision boundaries, can improve the performance. Experiments on various datasets verify our classifier-centric understanding.