We introduce nested diffusion models, an efficient and powerful hierarchical generative framework that substantially enhances the generation quality of diffusion models, particularly for images of complex scenes. Our approach employs a series of diffusion models to progressively generate latent variables at different semantic levels. Each model in this series is conditioned on the output of the preceding higher-level models, culminating in image generation. Hierarchical latent variables guide the generation process along predefined semantic pathways, allowing our approach to capture intricate structural details. To construct these latent variables, we leverage a pre-trained visual encoder, which learns strong semantic visual representations, and modulate its capacity via dimensionality reduction and noise injection. Across multiple datasets, our system demonstrates significant enhancements in image quality for both unconditional and class/text conditional generation. Moreover, our unconditional generation system substantially outperforms the baseline conditional system. These advancements incur minimal computational overhead as the more abstract levels of our hierarchy work with lower-dimensional representations.

Neural PDE solvers offer a powerful tool for modeling complex dynamical systems, but often struggle with error accumulation over long time horizons and maintaining stability and physical consistency. We introduce a multiscale implicit neural emulator that enhances long-term prediction accuracy by conditioning on a hierarchy of lower-dimensional future state representations. Drawing inspiration from the stability properties of numerical implicit time-stepping methods, our approach leverages predictions several steps ahead in time at increasing compression rates for next-timestep refinements. By actively adjusting the temporal downsampling ratios, our design enables the model to capture dynamics across multiple granularities and enforce long-range temporal coherence. Experiments on turbulent fluid dynamics show that our method achieves high short-term accuracy and produces long-term stable forecasts, significantly outperforming autoregressive baselines while adding minimal computational overhead.

This paper introduces a novel deep-learning-based approach for numerical simulation of a time-evolving Schrödinger equation inspired by stochastic mechanics and generative diffusion models. Unlike existing approaches, which exhibit computational complexity that scales exponentially in the problem dimension, our method allows us to adapt to the latent low-dimensional structure of the wave function by sampling from the Markovian diffusion. Depending on the latent dimension, our method may have far lower computational complexity in higher dimensions. Moreover, we propose novel equations for stochastic quantum mechanics, resulting in quadratic computational complexity with respect to the number of dimensions. Numerical simulations verify our theoretical findings and show a significant advantage of our method compared to other deep-learning-based approaches used for quantum mechanics.

Chaotic systems make long-horizon forecasts difficult because small perturbations in initial conditions cause trajectories to diverge at an exponential rate. In this setting, neural operators trained to minimize squared error losses, while capable of accurate short-term forecasts, often fail to reproduce statistical or structural properties of the dynamics over longer time horizons and can yield degenerate results. In this paper, we propose an alternative framework designed to preserve invariant measures of chaotic attractors that characterize the time-invariant statistical properties of the dynamics. Specifically, in the multi-environment setting (where each sample trajectory is governed by slightly different dynamics), we consider two novel approaches to training with noisy data. First, we propose a loss based on the optimal transport distance between the observed dynamics and the neural operator outputs. This approach requires expert knowledge of the underlying physics to determine what statistical features should be included in the optimal transport loss. Second, we show that a contrastive learning framework, which does not require any specialized prior knowledge, can preserve statistical properties of the dynamics nearly as well as the optimal transport approach. On a variety of chaotic systems, our method is shown empirically to preserve invariant measures of chaotic attractors.

This paper explores learning emulators for parameter estimation with uncertainty estimation of high-dimensional dynamical systems. We assume access to a computationally complex simulator that inputs a candidate parameter and outputs a corresponding multi-channel time series. Our task is to accurately estimate a range of likely values of the underlying parameters. Standard iterative approaches necessitate running the simulator many times, which is computationally prohibitive. This paper describes a novel framework for learning feature embeddings of observed dynamics jointly with an emulator that can replace high-cost simulators. Leveraging a contrastive learning approach, our method exploits intrinsic data properties within and across parameter and trajectory domains. On a coupled 396-dimensional multiscale Lorenz 96 system, our method significantly outperforms a typical parameter estimation method based on predefined metrics and a classical numerical simulator, and with only 1.19% of the baseline's computation time. Ablation studies highlight the potential of explicitly designing learned emulators for parameter estimation by leveraging contrastive learning.

We study pure exploration in bandits, where the dimension of the feature representation can be much larger than the number of arms. To overcome the curse of dimensionality, we propose to adaptively embed the feature representation of each arm into a lower-dimensional space and carefully deal with the induced model misspecifications. Our approach is conceptually very different from existing works that can either only handle low-dimensional linear bandits or passively deal with model misspecifications. We showcase the application of our approach to two pure exploration settings that were previously under-studied: (1) the reward function belongs to a possibly infinite-dimensional Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space, and (2) the reward function is nonlinear and can be approximated by neural networks. Our main results provide sample complexity guarantees that only depend on the effective dimension of the feature spaces in the kernel or neural representations. Extensive experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our methods.