On the universal structure in deterministic generative diffusion

Defang Chen, Zhenyu Zhou, Can Wang, Zeyu Zheng, Siwei Lyu

Diffusion-based generative modeling has emerged as a general computational framework for simulating high-dimensional, structured data across various domains. Understanding its generative mechanisms is paramount for advancing model training and inference in a principled way. Here, we demonstrate that deterministic sampling trajectories share a universal geometric structure invariant to data modalities and diffusion model implementations. This structure can be largely explained by an exactly solvable model based on the optimal linear denoiser.