Spectral Bayesian Regression on the Sphere

We develop a fully intrinsic Bayesian framework for nonparametric regression on the unit sphere based on isotropic Gaussian field priors and the harmonic structure induced by the Laplace-Beltrami operator. Under uniform random design, the regression model admits an exact diagonalization in the spherical harmonic basis, yielding a Gaussian sequence representation with frequency-dependent multiplicities. Exploiting this structure, we derive closed-form posterior distributions, optimal spectral truncation schemes, and sharp posterior contraction rates under integrated squared loss. For Gaussian priors with polynomially decaying angular power spectra, including spherical Matérn priors, we establish posterior contraction rates over Sobolev classes, which are minimax-optimal under correct prior calibration. We further show that the posterior mean admits an exact variational characterization as a geometrically intrinsic penalized least-squares estimator, equivalent to a Laplace-Beltrami smoothing spline.

Spectral Diffusion Models on the Sphere

Diffusion models provide a principled framework for generative modeling via stochastic differential equations and time-reversed dynamics. Extending spectral diffusion approaches to spherical data, however, raises nontrivial geometric and stochastic issues that are absent in the Euclidean setting. In this work, we develop a diffusion modeling framework defined directly on finite-dimensional spherical harmonic representations of real-valued functions on the sphere. We show that the spherical discrete Fourier transform maps spatial Brownian motion to a constrained Gaussian process in the frequency domain with deterministic, generally non-isotropic covariance. This induces modified forward and reverse-time stochastic differential equations in the spectral domain. As a consequence, spatial and spectral score matching objectives are no longer equivalent, even in the band-limited setting, and the frequency-domain formulation introduces a geometry-dependent inductive bias. We derive the corresponding diffusion equations and characterize the induced noise covariance.