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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09936 |
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| _version_ | 1866914617260769280 |
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| author | Turan, Erkan Dufour, Nicolas Ovsjanikov, Maks |
| author_facet | Turan, Erkan Dufour, Nicolas Ovsjanikov, Maks |
| contents | Generative Modeling via Drifting~\citep{deng2026drifting} has recently achieved state-of-the-art one-step image generation through a kernel-based drift operator, yet its success is largely empirical and its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. We observe that \emph{under a Gaussian kernel, the drift operator is exactly a score difference on smoothed distributions}. This answers three questions left open in the original work: (1) whether a vanishing drift guarantees equality of distributions ($V_{p,q}=0\Rightarrow p=q$), (2) how to choose between kernels, and (3) why the stop-gradient operator is indispensable for stable training. Our observations position drifting within the score-matching family. By linearizing the McKean-Vlasov dynamics and probing them in Fourier space, we reveal frequency-dependent convergence timescales comparable to \emph{Landau damping} in plasma kinetic theory: the Gaussian kernel suffers an exponential high-frequency bottleneck, potentially explaining the empirical preference for the Laplacian kernel. This suggests a fix: an exponential bandwidth annealing schedule $σ(t)=σ_0 e^{-rt}$ that reduces convergence time from $\exp(O(K_{\max}^2))$ to $O(\log K_{\max})$. Finally, by formalizing drifting as a Wasserstein gradient flow of the smoothed KL divergence, we prove that the stop-gradient operator is not a heuristic but is derived from the frozen-field discretization mandated by the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) scheme, and removing it severs training from any gradient-flow guarantee. This variational perspective further provides a general template for constructing novel drift operators, which we demonstrate with a Sinkhorn divergence drift. We validate our analysis on toy datasets and scale it up to ImageNet. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_09936 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Generative Drifting is Secretly Score Matching: a Spectral and Variational Perspective Turan, Erkan Dufour, Nicolas Ovsjanikov, Maks Machine Learning Generative Modeling via Drifting~\citep{deng2026drifting} has recently achieved state-of-the-art one-step image generation through a kernel-based drift operator, yet its success is largely empirical and its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. We observe that \emph{under a Gaussian kernel, the drift operator is exactly a score difference on smoothed distributions}. This answers three questions left open in the original work: (1) whether a vanishing drift guarantees equality of distributions ($V_{p,q}=0\Rightarrow p=q$), (2) how to choose between kernels, and (3) why the stop-gradient operator is indispensable for stable training. Our observations position drifting within the score-matching family. By linearizing the McKean-Vlasov dynamics and probing them in Fourier space, we reveal frequency-dependent convergence timescales comparable to \emph{Landau damping} in plasma kinetic theory: the Gaussian kernel suffers an exponential high-frequency bottleneck, potentially explaining the empirical preference for the Laplacian kernel. This suggests a fix: an exponential bandwidth annealing schedule $σ(t)=σ_0 e^{-rt}$ that reduces convergence time from $\exp(O(K_{\max}^2))$ to $O(\log K_{\max})$. Finally, by formalizing drifting as a Wasserstein gradient flow of the smoothed KL divergence, we prove that the stop-gradient operator is not a heuristic but is derived from the frozen-field discretization mandated by the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) scheme, and removing it severs training from any gradient-flow guarantee. This variational perspective further provides a general template for constructing novel drift operators, which we demonstrate with a Sinkhorn divergence drift. We validate our analysis on toy datasets and scale it up to ImageNet. |
| title | Generative Drifting is Secretly Score Matching: a Spectral and Variational Perspective |
| topic | Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09936 |