{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/convergence-of-flow-based-generative-models","title":"Convergence of flow-based generative models via proximal gradient descent in Wasserstein space","arxiv_id":"2310.17582","date":"2023-10-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xiuyuan Cheng","Jianfeng Lu","Yixin Tan","Yao Xie"],"abstract":"Flow-based generative models enjoy certain advantages in computing the data generation and the likelihood, and have recently shown competitive empirical performance. Compared to the accumulating theoretical studies on related score-based diffusion models, analysis of flow-based models, which are deterministic in both forward (data-to-noise) and reverse (noise-to-data) directions, remain sparse. In this paper, we provide a theoretical guarantee of generating data distribution by a progressive flow model, the so-called JKO flow model, which implements the Jordan-Kinderleherer-Otto (JKO) scheme in a normalizing flow network. Leveraging the exponential convergence of the proximal gradient descent (GD) in Wasserstein space, we prove the Kullback-Leibler (KL) guarantee of data generation by a JKO flow model to be $O(\\varepsilon^2)$ when using $N \\lesssim \\log (1/\\varepsilon)$ many JKO steps ($N$ Residual Blocks in the flow) where $\\varepsilon $ is the error in the per-step first-order condition. The assumption on data density is merely a finite second moment, and the theory extends to data distributions without density and when there are inversion errors in the reverse process where we obtain KL-$W_2$ mixed error guarantees. The non-asymptotic convergence rate of the JKO-type $W_2$-proximal GD is proved for a general class of convex objective functionals that includes the KL divergence as a special case, which can be of independent interest. The analysis framework can extend to other first-order Wasserstein optimization schemes applied to flow-based generative models.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17582v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.17582v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"convergence-of-flow-based-generative-models","repo_url":"https://github.com/yixintan-zeta/jko_wass_grad","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"diffusion","method_name":"Diffusion"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.17582","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2310.17582"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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