Diffusion Models without Classifier-free Guidance

Classifier-free Guidance (CFG) is central to modern diffusion models, but operates as an inference-time correction where the training objective learns the unbiased conditional score, while guided sampling targets a posterior-tilted score that never explicitly learned. Rather than another inference-time patch or distillation, Model-guidance (MG) directly integrates the posterior tilt into the training objective and eliminates CFG during inference. MG serves as a plug-and-play module compatible with existing methods, yet accelerates convergence by online self-bootstrapping and doubles inference speed. Unlike distillation surrogates, a reparameterisation property reveals that MG implicitly learns the vanilla score without mode collapse. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MG matches and even surpasses CFG baselines, and achieves a state-of-the-art FID of $1.34$ on ImageNet $256$ benchmark.