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Double Descent and Malign Overfitting in Diffusion Models

Research Multimodal & Generative

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TL;DR - Diffusion models can exhibit malign rather than benign overfitting: test loss begins worsening when parameters (p\sim n), long before the interpolation peak at (p\sim nm). Regularization restores the benefits of larger models and can outperform all unregularized configurations.

  • Experiments on CelebA U-Nets and a random-features model with closed-form learning curves support the same behavior.
  • With (m) noise realizations per sample, the interpolation peak shifts from the standard-regression scale (p\sim n) to (p\sim nm), while overfitting still starts near (p\sim n).
  • Bias grows as the learned model approaches the memorizing empirical score; beyond the peak, variance falls but bias continues increasing.
  • Ridge regularization in theory and early stopping in U-Net experiments make overparameterization beneficial.

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Double Descent and Malign Overfitting in Diffusion Models

arXiv cs.LG Raphaël Urfin, Tony Bonnaire, Giulio Biroli, Marc Mézard 2026-09-22 arXiv:2609.26392
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-24 14:15:58.777162 UTC

TL;DR - Diffusion models can exhibit malign rather than benign overfitting: test loss begins worsening when parameters (p\sim n), long before the interpolation peak at (p\sim nm). Regularization restores the benefits of larger models and can outperform all unregularized configurations.

  • Experiments on CelebA U-Nets and a random-features model with closed-form learning curves support the same behavior.
  • With (m) noise realizations per sample, the interpolation peak shifts from the standard-regression scale (p\sim n) to (p\sim nm), while overfitting still starts near (p\sim n).
  • Bias grows as the learned model approaches the memorizing empirical score; beyond the peak, variance falls but bias continues increasing.
  • Ridge regularization in theory and early stopping in U-Net experiments make overparameterization beneficial.
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