ICML 2026poster0 citations

Scalable Sampling via Generalized Fixed-Point Diffusion Matching

Denis Blessing, Lorenz Richter, Julius Berner, Egor Malitskiy, Gerhard Neumann

Abstract

Sampling from unnormalized densities using diffusion models has emerged as a powerful paradigm. However, while recent approaches that use least-squares `matching' objectives have improved scalability, they often necessitate significant trade-offs, such as restricting prior distributions or relying on unstable optimization schemes. By generalizing these methods as special forms of fixed-point iterations rooted in Nelson's relation, we develop a new method that addresses these limitations. Our approach enables learning a stochastic transport map between arbitrary prior and target distributions with a single, scalable, and stable objective. Furthermore, we introduce a damped variant of this iteration that incorporates a regularization term to mitigate mode collapse. Empirically, we demonstrate that our method enables sampling at unprecedented scales while preserving mode diversity, achieving state-of-the-art results on complex synthetic densities and high-dimensional molecular benchmarks.

DiffusionOptimizationBenchmark
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
blessing2026bridge,
title={Bridge Matching Sampler: Scalable Sampling via Generalized Fixed-Point Diffusion Matching},
author={Denis Blessing and Lorenz Richter and Julius Berner and Egor Malitskiy and Gerhard Neumann},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=gUbNUNuJbO}
}