Generative Myopia: Why Diffusion Models Fail at Structure
On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion foundations and sampling
Abstract (arXiv)
Graph Diffusion Models (GDMs) optimize for statistical likelihood, implicitly acting as frequency filters that favor abundant substructures over spectrally critical ones. We term this phenomenon Generative Myopia. In combinatorial tasks like graph sparsification, this leads to the catastrophic removal of ``rare bridges,'' edges that are structurally mandatory (Reff ≈ 1) but statistically scarce. We prove theoretically and empirically that this failure is driven by Gradient Starvation: the optimization landscape itself suppresses rare structural signals, rendering them unlearnable regardless of model capacity. To resolve this, we introduce Spectrally-Weighted Diffusion, which re-aligns the variational objective using Effective Resistance. We demonstrate that spectral priors can be amortized into the training phase with zero inference overhead. Our method eliminates myopia, matching the performance of an optimal Spectral Oracle and achieving 100% connectivity on adversarial benchmarks where standard diffusion fails completely (0%).
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 7 of its 11 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Nov 2025.
Builds on
7 of 11 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2023DIFUSCO: Graph-based Diffusion Solvers for Combinatorial Optimization16 Feb
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models19 Jun
Other references · 5
- 2018ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustnesscited by 1,430
- 2018On the Spectral Bias of Neural Networkscited by 1,321
- 2022Fast Graph Generation via Spectral Diffusioncited by 36
- 2025Do Graph Diffusion Models Accurately Capture and Generate Substructure Distributions?cited by 3
- 2025Spectral Neural Graph Sparsificationcited by 2
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- 2022Diffusion models as plug-and-play priors
- 2022Let us Build Bridges: Understanding and Extending Diffusion Generative Models
- 2025Diffusion Models: A Mathematical Introduction
- 2026DiffRGD: An Inference-Time Diffusion Guidance Through Riemannian Gradient Descent
- 2025Demystifying Diffusion Objectives: Reweighted Losses are Better Variational Bounds