May 13, 2026 · math.OCJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Boyang Zhang, Zhiguo Wang, Ya-Feng Liu
School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Mathematics, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China · Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Mathematics and Information Networks, Beijing, China · School of Mathematical Sciences, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China
Score-based diffusion models demonstrate superior performance in generative tasks but encounter fundamental bottlenecks in inverse problems due to the analytical intractability of the time-dependent likelihood score. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel proximal-based generative modeling (PGM) framework that rigorously circumvents explicit likelihood evaluation. Our framework is built upon a theoretical equivalence between Gaussian convolution in diffusion processes and Moreau-Yosida regularization in nonsmooth optimization. This enables a new sampling mechanism driven by the proposed Moreau score, which admits a closed-form expression via proximal operators. Moreover, we introduce Moreau score matching to learn the proximal operators that rely solely on samples drawn from the prior distribution. Theoretically, PGM eliminates the early-stopping bias inherent in the score-based diffusion model and achieves non-asymptotic convergence. Experiments demonstrate that PGM significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods in reconstruction quality and sampling time.