Jumping up and down: Denoiser diffusion models for discrete ordinal data

Yair Shenfeld, Ricardo Baptista, Stefano Peluchetti

Diffusion models are highly developed in continuous spaces for image and video domains. Recently, major advances have been made for discrete diffusion models for categorical data, specifically in the language domain. In contrast, diffusion models for discrete integer-valued data are less developed, despite the prevalence of this modality, ranging from images and music to gene counts. We introduce Jumping Up and Down (JUD)---a new family of denoiser-based diffusion models for discrete ordinal data. This is the first family of diffusion models for ordinal data which centers around training denoisers, which at the same time allows for bi-directional (up and down) perturbations of the data. The simplicity of the training objective, combined with the flexibility of bi-directional perturbations, leads us to obtain competitive results across different data modalities.