Using FlowBoost, a closed-loop deep generative optimization framework for extremal structure discovery, we investigate ℓp-generalizations of the finite free Stam inequality for real-rooted polynomials under finite free additive convolution ⊞n. At p=2, FlowBoost finds the Hermite pair as the unique equality case and reveals the spectral structure of the linearized convolution map at this extremal point. As a result, we conjecture that the singular values of the doubly stochastic coupling matrix En on the mean-zero subspace are 2−k/2:k=1,…,n−1, independent of n. Conditional on this conjecture, we obtain a sharp local stability constant and the finite free CLT convergence rate, both uniform in n. We introduce a one-parameter family of p-Stam inequalities using ℓp-Fisher information and prove that the Hermite pair itself violates the inequality for every p>2, with the sign of the deficit governed by the ℓp-contraction ratio of En. Systematic computation via FlowBoost supports the conjecture that p∗=2 is the sharp critical exponent. For p<2, the extremal configurations undergo a bifurcation, meaning that they become non-matching pairs with bimodal root structure, converging back to the Hermite diagonal only as p→2−. Our findings demonstrate that FlowBoost, can be an effective tool of mathematical discovery in infinite-dimensional extremal problems.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. E-value-based AHT as used in this study. FlowBoost first produces elite extremal samples En,p . These are compressed into summary statistics T(En,p) , compared against a library of low-complexity candidate families H , and screened against the Hermite baseline through the conditional e-values of ( 13 ). A candidate family is promoted only when its population-level fit remains stable across the tested grid and its e-value evidence is persistently favorable.
n
ρmin
Dmin
dPQ,min
Spearman (ρ,D)
6
2.1×10−9
5.3×10−10
1.2×10−5
0.89
8
2.2×10−8
3.2×10−9
6.6×10−5
0.87
10
3.6×10−7
4.0×10−8
1.0×10−5
0.85
12
8.2×10−7
1.1×10−8
4.6×10−4
0.80
20
2.0×10−7
2.4×10−8
3.6×10−4
0.80
50
8.4×10−6
5.0×10−7
1.0×10−4
0.79
Table 1. FlowBoost results at p=2 . ρmin is the best scale-free deficit; Dmin and dPQ,min are the Hermite distance and mismatch at the best sample.
i=1
i=2
i=3
i=4
i=5
i=6
hi(6)
−1.4866
−0.8449
−0.2758
−0.2758
−0.8449
−1.4866
αi
−1.4866
−0.8449
−0.2758
−0.2758
−0.8449
−1.4867
βi
−1.4866
−0.8449
−0.2758
−0.2758
−0.8449
−1.4867
Table 2. Best sample at n=6 : root vectors α,β vs. normalized Hermite roots h(6) , displayed to four decimal places. The apparent discrepancy at i=6 ( 1.4867 vs. 1.4866 ) is a rounding artifact; the true residual Dmin=5.3×10−10 (see Table 1 ) is consistent with agreement to nine significant figures.
n
σ1
σ2
σ3
σ4
σ5
rel.err.
conj.
0.707106781
0.500000000
0.353553391
0.250000000
0.176776695
—
10
0.707106781
0.500000000
0.353553391
0.250000000
0.176776695
1.33×10−14
40
0.707106781
0.500000000
0.353553391
0.250000000
0.176776695
8.02×10−11
60
0.707106778
0.500000000
0.353553391
0.249999999
0.176776697
1.15×10−7
80
0.707104585
0.499997829
0.353554003
0.249999577
0.176779011
5.77×10−5
90
0.707145636
0.500091161
0.353518684
0.250002448
0.176746177
4.56×10−4
Table 3. Singular values of En∣W vs. the conjectured σk=2−k/2 , together with the maximum relative error among the first ten modes.
Figure 2. High-precision numerical evidence for the conjectured dyadic spectrum of the Hermite coupling operator En∣W . Panel (a) plots log2σk for the first ten singular values at the representative degrees n=20,40,60,90 , together with the reference line log2σk=−k/2 . Panel (b) shows the maximum relative error among the first ten singular values across the high-precision restricted audit n∈{10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80,90} .
Figure 3. Representative convergence trajectories for the variance-normalized finite free central limit iteration at n=20 . Each colored curve tracks the perturbation norm dH(fk) for a different Hermite initialization, while the dashed line gives the reference decay (1/2)k predicted by the conjectural second singular value. After a short transient, the observed slopes are consistent with geometric contraction at the predicted rate.
p
n=6
n=8
n=10
n=12
n=20
2.0625
−0.0400
−0.0400
−0.0394
−0.0379
−0.0222
2.125
−0.0744
−0.0743
−0.0738
−0.0719
−0.0585
2.25
−0.1303
−0.1302
−0.1296
−0.1275
−0.1114
2.5
−0.2086
−0.2084
−0.2082
−0.2051
−0.1838
3.0
−0.2987
−0.2983
−0.2972
−0.2949
−0.2775
4.0
−0.3819
−0.3814
−0.3811
−0.3787
−0.3627
Table 4. Minimum p -Stam deficit gp for p>2 . All entries are negative.
Figure 4. Global computational phase diagram for the p -Stam problem on the tested (n,p) grid. The color in each cell is sgn(gpmin)log10(1+∣gpmin∣) , so the sign records whether the best observed deficit is positive or negative and the magnitude records its logarithmic size. The sign transition occurs at p=2 on the tested grid, while the post-processed numerical reporting in the text and tables is given in terms of the additive deficit gp . Visually, the figure separates the observed validity region p≤2 from the counterexample region p>2 in a single degree-uniform picture.
n
p
D(α∗,β∗)
dPQ(α∗,β∗)
6
2.0625
1.4×10−5
1.6×10−4
8
2.0625
1.1×10−5
9.3×10−5
10
2.0625
2.2×10−5
1.5×10−3
12
2.0625
1.5×10−4
1.2×10−2
20
2.0625
9.3×10−4
2.4×10−2
Table 5. Structure of the best counterexamples for p>2 .
p
n=6
n=8
n=10
n=12
n=20
1.05
4.47×10−10
2.40×10−8
1.66×10−6
8.22×10−5
3.90×10−3
1.2
1.81×10−3
3.09×10−3
1.43×10−2
2.21×10−2
1.17×10−1
1.5
1.46×10−2
2.92×10−2
6.70×10−2
8.50×10−2
6.48×10−1
1.8
1.69×10−2
2.56×10−2
5.62×10−2
8.66×10−2
1.81×10−1
2.0
1.30×10−8
1.09×10−5
3.94×10−4
1.38×10−3
1.94×10−2
Table 6. Minimum p -Stam deficit gp for the tested subcritical grid and the quadratic endpoint. All entries are positive (inequality supported).
n
p
Best
Med. djt
Consist.
Best dPQ
Best D
Sym. (S3, t=0.1 )
6
1.05
2BU
0.178
1.000
0.507
0.275
0%
6
1.2
2BU
0.444
1.000
0.496
0.263
0%
6
1.5
2BU
0.470
1.000
0.705
0.530
0%
6
1.8
He
0.034
0.281
0.020
4×10−4
94%
8
1.05
2BU
0.617
0.750
0.761
0.619
0%
8
1.2
2BU
0.603
0.926
0.842
0.647
0%
Table 7. Full extremizer structure as a function of (n,p) . “2BU” = two-block uniform, “He” = Hermite, Consistency: fraction of the best set for which the stated family achieves the lowest djoint .
Figure 5. Root-configuration atlas for the best observed configurations at two representative degrees, n=12 and n=20 , across the transition in p . In each panel, the blue and red rows show the jointly normalized root locations of α and β , respectively, while the annotated value gives the best observed additive deficit gp at that parameter pair. Read from left to right, the atlas exhibits a clear geometric progression: non-matching clustered configurations for p<2 , a transitional Hermite regime around p=1.8 , the Hermite diagonal at p=2 , and Hermite matching counterexamples for p>2 .
n
p=1.05
p=1.2
p=1.5
p=1.8
6
0.506
0.516
0.505
0.034
8
0.712
0.643
0.548
0.112
10
0.723
0.776
0.740
0.064
12
0.796
0.773
0.740
0.063
20
0.739
0.727
0.394
0.111
Table 8. Hermite median djoint (distance of best set to Hermite) as a function of p .
Figure 6. Population-level order-statistic bands and gap analysis for the top- 100 elite samples at each displayed (n,p) pair. In the first three columns, each polynomial is normalized independently to mean 0 and unit variance, and then the median together with the 25 – 75% and 10 – 90% bands of the i -th sorted root are plotted separately for α and β . A two-block population appears here as a stable jump between root indices n/2 and n/2+1 . The rightmost column reports the elite distribution of the scale-free gap statistic maxΔ/med(Δrest) , where Δ denotes adjacent normalized root gaps. Both diagnostics separate the subcritical cases p=1.05,1.2 from the quadratic endpoint p=2.0 .
Figure 7. Compact summary of the subcritical bifurcation. Panel (a) contrasts a representative low- p root distribution with the quadratic Hermite geometry; Panel (b) tracks the best pair-mismatch statistic dPQ across p ; and Panel (c) tracks the best Hermite distance D . Together the panels summarize the two main structural signatures of the transition: mismatch and non-Hermite geometry both persist well below p=2 and collapse rapidly as p→2− .
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
n
p
E
Reject H0
Favoured model
6
1.05
5.28×1036
Yes
Two-block uniform
6
1.2
5.28×1036
Yes
Two-block uniform
6
1.5
5.28×1036
Yes
Two-block uniform
6
1.8
6.831
No
Inconclusive
6
2.0
0.008
No
Hermite
8
1.05
4.95×1029
Yes
Two-block uniform
Appendix
Table 9. Conditional e-values for the one-sided screen H0He(2BU;n,p):P(R2BU<RHe)≤1/2 against the alternative that two-block uniform beats Hermite more than half the time on the top- 512 elite. Meff is the number of non-tied comparisons after removing samples for which both residuals are equal. Cells where the e-value saturates at 5.28×1036 correspond to all non-tied comparisons won by two-block uniform. The decision column uses the 5% e-value rule E≥20 .
Figure 8. Stage-wise results for the p=2 FlowBoost pipeline at representative degrees n=6,8,10,12,20 . SRP first identifies a high-quality feasible region, supervised CFM learns a proposal distribution from that region, and reward-guided fine-tuning sharpens the proposal distribution further so that the subsequent final push attains the best values.
A growing class of machine-learning objects -- covariance and Gram matrices, kernel and attention matrices, MIMO channel matrices, density operators -- are naturally spectra rather than coordinate vectors. Building a denoising diffusion model for such data by corrupting eigenvalues coordinatewise is not merely elegant: it converges to the wrong limit, because eigenvalues repel rather than move independently. Free probability theory supplies the correct forward process, with free convolution replacing classical convolution and Voiculescu's conjugate variable replacing the score, but constant-coefficient free diffusions have a hidden limitation of their own: their only possible equilibrium is the semicircular law, whatever the target distribution looks like. We show that state-dependent free volatility removes this restriction. For any sufficiently regular compactly supported target law, we explicitly construct, through a closed-form Hilbert-transform drift, a free Fokker--Planck flow having that law as a stationary spectral distribution. Under an additional convex-potential condition, the construction admits a globally relaxing diffusion interpretation, reverse-time dynamics, and a trainable score. The generalization is genuine rather than cosmetic: no change of spectral variable reduces it to the constant-coefficient case, and it is a Wasserstein gradient flow only for an explicitly characterized family of coefficients that contains no bounded non-constant member. We instantiate the construction on the Marchenko--Pastur law, the limiting spectrum of isotropic sample covariance matrices, and validate it numerically: the free-versus-coordinatewise gap, an exact dimension-independent score driving reverse-time matrix dynamics at several matrix sizes, the designed Marchenko--Pastur equilibrium, and end-to-end generation with a learned score.
Strichartz inequalities are a cornerstone of the modern theory of dispersive PDEs, but their extremizers are known explicitly only in a handful of sharp cases. The non-convexity of the underlying functional makes the problem hard, and to our knowledge no systematic numerical attack has been attempted. We propose a simple neural-network-based pipeline that searches for extremizers as critical points of the Strichartz ratio, and apply it in three settings. First, on the Schrödinger group we recover the Gaussian extremizers of Foschi and Hundertmark--Zharnitsky in dimensions d=1,2 to within 10−3 relative error, with no analytical prior. Second, on 59 further admissible pairs in d=1 where the answer is conjectural, the method consistently finds Gaussians, supporting the conjecture that Gaussians are the universal extremizers in the admissible range. Third, on the critical Airy--Strichartz inequality at γ=1/q, where existence is open, the optimization does not converge to any L2 profile: instead, the iterates organize themselves as mKdV breathers B(0,⋅;α,1,0,0) with growing internal frequency α, and the discovered ratio approaches the Frank--Sabin universal lower bound Aq,r from below with a power-law gap ∼α−0.9. We confirm the same picture with an independent Hermite-basis ansatz. We propose a precise conjecture: the supremum equals Aq,r and is approached, but not attained, along the breather family. The pipeline thus serves both as a validator on known cases and as a discovery tool when no extremizer exists.
Nicolás Valenzuela, Ricardo Freire, Claudio Muñoz
Departamento de Ingeniería Matemática Universidad de Chile Santiago, Chile · DIM & CMM (UMI 2807 CNRS) Universidad de Chile Santiago, Chile
Reconstructing PDE solutions from sparse observations is a core challenge in scientific computing. We present FM4PDE, a flow-matching generative framework that learns the joint distribution of PDE coefficients (or initial states) and solutions (or final states), enabling both forward simulation and inverse recovery with limited paired data. At inference, sampling is guided by a composite loss that enforces agreement with sparse measurements and reduces the PDE residual; we support deterministic, stochastic, and hybrid samplers. We provide error guarantees for these guided procedures. For the deterministic optimizer, a coercivity condition ensures trajectory boundedness and a phase-wise contraction yields logarithmic complexity in the target accuracy. For the stochastic sampler, we introduce adaptive guidance and assume dissipativity of the velocity field to obtain uniform moment bounds independent of the noise-floor parameter. This leads to polynomial-time error bounds, and a matching lower bound shows constant guidance induces an unavoidable positive bias, motivating adaptivity. A hybrid deterministic-stochastic analysis is also provided. Experiments on static and time-dependent benchmark PDEs demonstrate competitive accuracy and faster inference than diffusion-based generative models.
Xifeng Zhang, Jin Zhao
School of Mathematical Science Capital Normal University Beijing, 100048, China · Academy for Multidisciplinary Studies Capital Normal University2026 Beijing, 100048, China