Colloquia
The Colloquia are followed by a reception designed to give people the opportunity to have more informal contact with the speaker. A book display will be available at this time in the common room. The series is funded, in part, through the generous support of Oxford University Press.
The colloquia are aimed towards a general mathematical audience.
Please note that the list below only shows forthcoming events, which may not include regular events that have not yet been entered for the forthcoming term. Please see the past events page for a list of all seminar series that the department has on offer.
Fri, 23 Oct 2026
16:00 -
17:00
L1
Generative modeling with flows and diffusions
Eric Vanden-Eijnden
(New York University)
Abstract
Modern generative models are behind today's systems for generating text, images, and video, and are increasingly used in scientific applications. Mathematically, they can be understood as solutions to a problem of transport of measure: transform a simple reference distribution into a complex target known only through samples. Many of the most successful approaches perform this transport dynamically, by learning the velocity of an ODE or the drift of an SDE whose solution carries one distribution onto the other. I will describe how flow matching with stochastic interpolants makes this construction explicit, treats deterministic flows and diffusions within a single framework, and reduces learning the dynamics to simple quadratic regression problems. I will explain how the design of the interpolation shapes the transport, and what this implies for accuracy and computational cost. I will conclude by discussing how the flow map of the ODE can be learned directly, enabling sampling in one or a few steps, and point to some open mathematical questions.