Wasserstein Gradient Flows and Forward-Only Diffusion Are Not Enough for Multimodal Sampling

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.02081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There has been a proliferation of sampling algorithms based on Wasserstein gradient flows (WGF) and forward-only diffusion processes (FODP), often accompanied by theoretical guarantees of exponentially fast convergence to the target distribution. These guarantees are frequently interpreted as evidence that such methods can efficiently sample complex multimodal distributions, often supported by empirical results. In this work, we argue that this i