Learning to Denoise — DDPM and the Loss That Trains Every Image Model
The reverse of destruction is generation — but only if a network can learn to run one small step of the destruction backwards. The surprise at the heart of DDPM is how plain the training recipe turned out to be: corrupt an image, ask the network which noise was added, score it with mean squared error. No adversary, no instability — a regression loss so simple it reads like a tutorial exercise, hiding a derivation that connects it to maximum likelihood.
Small Gaussian forward steps make each reverse step approximately Gaussian — so generation reduces to regression. DDPM's recipe: predict the added noise, score it with plain mean squared error, sample by walking the chain backwards with fresh noise injected each step. Four lines of training loop, and why they beat the trilemma.