Stochastic Transition-Map Distillation for Fast Probabilistic Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Rapakoulias, George, Garud, Peter, Zhu, Lingjiong, Tsiotras, Panagiotis
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Rapakoulias, George
Garud, Peter
Zhu, Lingjiong
Tsiotras, Panagiotis
author_facet Rapakoulias, George
Garud, Peter
Zhu, Lingjiong
Tsiotras, Panagiotis
contents Diffusion models achieve strong generation quality, diversity, and distribution coverage, but their performance often comes with expensive inference. In this work, we propose Stochastic Transition-Map Distillation (STMD), a teacher-free framework for accelerating diffusion model inference while preserving probabilistic sample generation. In contrast to score-based diffusion models, whose denoising parametrization models the mean of the posterior distribution, STMD distills the full transition map associated with the sampling stochastic differential equation (SDE). We parameterize these SDE transitions with a conditional Mean Flow model, yielding a one- or few-step stochastic sampler that retains the transition structure of the underlying diffusion process. This perspective is especially useful for downstream tasks that require stochastic inference, such as diffusion posterior sampling, inverse problems, and energy-based fine-tuning. Compared to recent distillation methods, STMD requires no pretrained teacher, bi-level optimization, or trajectory simulation and caching, enabling efficient and scalable training. We derive convergence bounds for our method in the Wasserstein distance, providing a strong theoretical foundation for our approach, and validate STMD on various image generation examples on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CelebA datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07661
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stochastic Transition-Map Distillation for Fast Probabilistic Inference
Rapakoulias, George
Garud, Peter
Zhu, Lingjiong
Tsiotras, Panagiotis
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Diffusion models achieve strong generation quality, diversity, and distribution coverage, but their performance often comes with expensive inference. In this work, we propose Stochastic Transition-Map Distillation (STMD), a teacher-free framework for accelerating diffusion model inference while preserving probabilistic sample generation. In contrast to score-based diffusion models, whose denoising parametrization models the mean of the posterior distribution, STMD distills the full transition map associated with the sampling stochastic differential equation (SDE). We parameterize these SDE transitions with a conditional Mean Flow model, yielding a one- or few-step stochastic sampler that retains the transition structure of the underlying diffusion process. This perspective is especially useful for downstream tasks that require stochastic inference, such as diffusion posterior sampling, inverse problems, and energy-based fine-tuning. Compared to recent distillation methods, STMD requires no pretrained teacher, bi-level optimization, or trajectory simulation and caching, enabling efficient and scalable training. We derive convergence bounds for our method in the Wasserstein distance, providing a strong theoretical foundation for our approach, and validate STMD on various image generation examples on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CelebA datasets.
title Stochastic Transition-Map Distillation for Fast Probabilistic Inference
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07661