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Trees to Flows and Back: Unifying Decision Trees and Diffusion Models (https://arxiv.org)

49 points by rsn243 1 day ago | 11 comments | View on ycombinator

niksmather about 20 hours ago |

Apologies if I didn't understand the paper, but why do you want to apply diffusion models to tabular datasets in the first place?

Do we think they'll be better than decision trees? Is there some tabular problem that can be handled by diffusion but not trees?

henrydark about 18 hours ago |

Is the code available somewhere?

semessier about 21 hours ago |

this lacks the math for any bold claims

gorold about 18 hours ago |

Figure 1 definitely cleared up any misunderstandings I had about the paper

rsn243 1 day ago |

Decision trees and diffusion models are ostensibly disparate model classes, one discrete and hierarchical, the other continuous and dynamic. This work unifies the two by establishing a crisp mathematical correspondence between hierarchical decision trees and diffusion processes in appropriate limiting regimes. Our unification reveals a shared optimization principle: \emph{Global Trajectory Score Matching (GTSM)}, for which gradient boosting (in an idealized version) is asymptotically optimal. We underscore the conceptual value of our work through two key practical instantiations: \treeflow, which achieves competitive generation quality on tabular data with higher fidelity and a 2\times computational speedup, and \dsmtree, a novel distillation method that transfers hierarchical decision logic into neural networks, matching teacher performance within 2\% on many benchmarks.