A transport approach to the cutoff phenomenon

Substantial progress has recently been made in the understanding of the cutoff phenomenon for Markov processes, using an information-theoretic statistics known as varentropy [Sal23; Sal24; Sal25a; PS25]. In the present paper, we propose an alternative approach which bypasses the use of varentropy and exploits instead a new W-TV transport inequality, combined with a classical parabolic regularization estimate [BGL01; OV01]. While currently restricted to non-negatively curved processes on smooth spaces, our argument no longer requires the chain rule, nor any approximate version thereof. As applications, we recover the main result of [Sal25a] establishing cutoff for the log-concave Langevin dynamics, and extend the conclusion to a widely-used discrete-time sampling algorithm known as the Proximal Sampler.

Improved Convergence of Score-Based Diffusion Models via Prediction-Correction

Score-based generative models (SGMs) are powerful tools to sample from complex data distributions. Their underlying idea is to (i) run a forward process for time $T_1$ by adding noise to the data, (ii) estimate its score function, and (iii) use such estimate to run a reverse process. As the reverse process is initialized with the stationary distribution of the forward one, the existing analysis paradigm requires $T_1\to\infty$. This is however problematic: from a theoretical viewpoint, for a given precision of the score approximation, the convergence guarantee fails as $T_1$ diverges; from a practical viewpoint, a large $T_1$ increases computational costs and leads to error propagation. This paper addresses the issue by considering a version of the popular predictor-corrector scheme: after running the forward process, we first estimate the final distribution via an inexact Langevin dynamics and then revert the process. Our key technical contribution is to provide convergence guarantees in Wasserstein distance which require to run the forward process only for a finite time $T_1$. Our bounds exhibit a mild logarithmic dependence on the input dimension and the subgaussian norm of the target distribution, have minimal assumptions on the data, and require only to control the $L^2$ loss on the score approximation, which is the quantity minimized in practice.