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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Brutti, Pierpaolo, Durastanti, Claudio, Mari, Francesco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20498
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Table of Contents:
  • Diffusion models provide a principled framework for generative modeling via stochastic differential equations and time-reversed dynamics. Extending spectral diffusion approaches to spherical data, however, raises nontrivial geometric and stochastic issues that are absent in the Euclidean setting. In this work, we develop a diffusion modeling framework defined directly on finite-dimensional spherical harmonic representations of real-valued functions on the sphere. We show that the spherical discrete Fourier transform maps spatial Brownian motion to a constrained Gaussian process in the frequency domain with deterministic, generally non-isotropic covariance. This induces modified forward and reverse-time stochastic differential equations in the spectral domain. As a consequence, spatial and spectral score matching objectives are no longer equivalent, even in the band-limited setting, and the frequency-domain formulation introduces a geometry-dependent inductive bias. We derive the corresponding diffusion equations and characterize the induced noise covariance.