Expressivity of Bi-Lipschitz Normalizing Flows: A Score-Based Diffusion Perspective

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Hauptverfasser: Iske, Meira, Schönlieb, Carola-Bibiane
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Iske, Meira
Schönlieb, Carola-Bibiane
author_facet Iske, Meira
Schönlieb, Carola-Bibiane
contents Many normalizing flow architectures impose regularity constraints, yet their distributional approximation properties are not fully characterized. We study the expressivity of bi-Lipschitz normalizing flows through the lens of score-based diffusion models. For the probability flow ODE of a variance-preserving diffusion, Lipschitz regularity of the score induces a flow of bi-Lipschitz diffeomorphic transport maps. This ODE bridge allows us to analyze the distributional approximation power of bi-Lipschitz normalizing flows and, conversely, derive deterministic convergence guarantees for diffusion-based transport. Our key idea is to use the probability flow ODE to link regularity of the score to regularity of the induced transport maps. We verify score regularity for broad target densities, including compactly supported densities, Gaussian convolutions of compactly supported measures and finite Gaussian mixtures. We obtain a universal distributional approximation result: Gaussian pullbacks induced by bi-Lipschitz variance-preserving transport maps are $L^1$-dense among all probability densities. For Gaussian convolution targets, we further obtain convergence in Kullback-Leibler divergence without early stopping.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06172
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Expressivity of Bi-Lipschitz Normalizing Flows: A Score-Based Diffusion Perspective
Iske, Meira
Schönlieb, Carola-Bibiane
Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
Probability
Many normalizing flow architectures impose regularity constraints, yet their distributional approximation properties are not fully characterized. We study the expressivity of bi-Lipschitz normalizing flows through the lens of score-based diffusion models. For the probability flow ODE of a variance-preserving diffusion, Lipschitz regularity of the score induces a flow of bi-Lipschitz diffeomorphic transport maps. This ODE bridge allows us to analyze the distributional approximation power of bi-Lipschitz normalizing flows and, conversely, derive deterministic convergence guarantees for diffusion-based transport. Our key idea is to use the probability flow ODE to link regularity of the score to regularity of the induced transport maps. We verify score regularity for broad target densities, including compactly supported densities, Gaussian convolutions of compactly supported measures and finite Gaussian mixtures. We obtain a universal distributional approximation result: Gaussian pullbacks induced by bi-Lipschitz variance-preserving transport maps are $L^1$-dense among all probability densities. For Gaussian convolution targets, we further obtain convergence in Kullback-Leibler divergence without early stopping.
title Expressivity of Bi-Lipschitz Normalizing Flows: A Score-Based Diffusion Perspective
topic Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06172