Local Fokker--Planck Geometry for Score Estimation: Heat-Ball Mean-Value Representations and Exact High-Dimensional Sampling
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Abstract (arXiv)
Score-based generative models and Langevin samplers rely on estimating the score function nablaxlog pt(x) of a forward diffusion. Classically this is tractable when the drift is linear: the marginal density is Gaussian and the score is a global conditional expectation. For a general nonlinear, state-dependent drift the marginal density has no closed form, and existing methods--denoising score matching and global Fokker--Planck residual penalties--resort to global averaging that inflates estimation error in low-density regions precisely where accuracy is most critical. We address this by developing a local Fokker--Planck geometric framework that replaces global conditioning with local parabolic averaging. Our approach rests on three contributions. First, a time change to the cumulative-variance coordinate reduces the variable-coefficient Fokker--Planck equation to a standard inhomogeneous heat equation, on which we extend Evans' classical heat-ball monotonicity method to derive exact local mean-value representations for the score nablaxlog p together with the density, log-density, and entropy density; local well-posedness is established under an explicit dimension-dependent drift budget. Second, for high-dimensional Monte Carlo evaluation of the resulting heat-ball integrals, we introduce the kappa-measure and derive its exact factorized sampler with unit per-sample weight, chi22 radial concentration. Third, the r→0 limit of the heat-ball residual recovers the pointwise Fokker--Planck residual, showing that the local framework is a one-parameter generalization of global FP-residual methods, and that the DSM population minimizer is feasible for the heat-ball constraint at every scale. We validate the framework on 2D structured data on 256-dimensional MNIST, and on a dedicated sampler study confirming the concentration laws.
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References · 10
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
- 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 9,122
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
- 2019Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distributioncited by 4,101
- 2022Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Modelscited by 3,045
- 2022Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolantscited by 995
- 2021Diffusion Schr"odinger Bridge with Applications to Score-Based Generative Modelingcited by 602
- 2021A Variational Perspective on Diffusion-Based Generative Models and Score Matchingcited by 183
- 2021Moser Flow: Divergence-based Generative Modeling on Manifoldscited by 67
- 2022FP-Diffusion: Improving Score-based Diffusion Models by Enforcing the Underlying Score Fokker-Planck Equationcited by 36
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- 2022Sampling is as easy as learning the score: theory for diffusion models with minimal data assumptions
- 2023Closing the ODE-SDE gap in score-based diffusion models through the Fokker-Planck equation
- 2025From Score Matching to Diffusion: A Fine-Grained Error Analysis in the Gaussian Setting
- 2026A Stochastic Analysis Perspective on Diffusion Models
- 2026On the Robustness of Langevin Dynamics to Score Function Error
- 2026Training-Free Generative Sampling via Moment-Matched Score Smoothing
- 2026Diffusion Removes Langevin's Conditioning Dependence: A Sharp Gaussian Analysis