The document discusses a new approach to unsupervised deep learning using concepts from nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Specifically, it proposes destroying structure in data through an iterative forward diffusion process, then learning the reverse diffusion process to restore structure and act as a generative model. This approach is shown to outperform other generative models on image datasets like CIFAR-10 and is able to perform tasks like inpainting. The diffusion process is modeled using Gaussian distributions and the reverse process is learned using a deep network as an approximator.
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