2026
Skipping the Zeros in Diffusion Models for Sparse Data Generation
Phil Sidney Ostheimer, Mayank Kumar Nagda, Andriy Balinskyy, Gabriel Rodrigues, Jean Radig, Carl Herrmann +3
ICML 2026poster
Diffusion models (DMs) excel on dense continuous data, but are not designed for sparse continuous data. They do not model exact zeros that represent the deliberate absence of a signal. As a result, they erase sparsity patterns and perform unnecessary computation on mostly zero entries. With Sparsity…