English

Bridge Matching Sampler: Scalable Sampling via Generalized Fixed-Point Diffusion Matching

Machine Learning 2026-03-03 v1

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, called Bridge Matching Sampler (BMS). 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 and further stabilize training. 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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.00530,
  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},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.00530},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Preprint

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:57:01.428Z