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End-to-End Differentiable Diffusion Conditioning for Physics-Informed Optimization

Summary

The paper introduces Differentiable Diffusion Conditioning (D2C), which exploits deterministic sampling to make the reverse denoising chain differentiable with respect to the conditioning signal, turning a frozen conditional diffusion model into an end-to-end gradient-based optimizer for offline model-based optimization.

SourcearXiv Machine LearningAuthor: Ricardo Luna Gutierrez, Vineet Gundecha, Rahman Ejaz, Varchas Gopalaswamy, Riccardo Betti, Sahand Ghorbanpour, Aarne Lees, Soumyendu Sarkar
End-to-End Differentiable Diffusion Conditioning for Physics-Informed Optimization
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[Submitted on 22 Oct 2026]

Title:End-to-End Differentiable Diffusion Conditioning for Physics-Informed Optimization

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Abstract:Optimizing high-dimensional physical systems under expensive evaluations and complex constraints is a central challenge in science and engineering. In offline model-based optimization (MBO), methods must improve designs using only a fixed dataset and no test-time access to the true objective. However, existing methods typically suffer from conservatism, unconstrained surrogate exploitation, or function as static inference-time samplers that cannot refine candidates against precise physical objectives. In this paper, we propose Differentiable Diffusion Conditioning (D2C) for offline MBO, which leverages the fact that deterministic sampling makes the reverse denoising chain differentiable with respect to the conditioning signal. D2C turns a frozen conditional diffusion model into an end-to-end gradient-based optimizer by directly optimizing conditioning variables at test time via gradients from frozen surrogate objectives and physics-informed penalties backpropagated through the reverse chain. We implement this idea in a composed proposer-evaluator framework and evaluate it on laser pulse optimization for inertial confinement fusion, sustainable data-center workload scheduling, and four Design-Bench tasks. Our method achieves the strongest results on the two real-world tasks and the best average rank across four Design-Bench tasks.

Comments: Initial version submitted to the NeurIPS 2026 main conference pending publication

Subjects:

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

Cite as: arXiv:2610.31721 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.31721v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.31721

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Soumyendu Sarkar [view email] [v1] Thu, 22 Oct 2026 09:53:05 UTC (209 KB)

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Key points

  • D2C optimizes conditioning variables at test time via gradients from frozen surrogate objectives and physics-informed penalties backpropagated through the reverse chain
  • The method is implemented as a composed proposer-evaluator framework
  • It achieves the strongest results on two real-world tasks and the best average rank across four Design-Bench tasks

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.