Score Accuracy Along the Forward Diffusion Does Not Certify Numerical Stability in Diffusion Sampling

Score-based diffusion models are typically trained by minimizing the $L^2$ score matching error, and standard theoretical analyses rely on this quantity to bound the sampling discrepancy between the learned and target distributions. We show the $L^2$ score error is not the right intrinsic measure of marginal distributional quality: a learned diffusion model can incur arbitrarily large $L^2$ score error while perfectly matching the target distribution. By decomposing score errors into a gradient and a solenoidal component (a Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition), we identify the geometric reason behind this: only the gradient component enters the marginal Fokker-Planck dynamics, while the solenoidal component is structurally invisible. We make this precise in three results. First, building on the corrected geometry, we prove an impossibility result: no monotone function of the $L^2$ score error can uniformly lower bound any divergence between the learned and target distributions. Second, we derive an upper bound on the Kullback-Leibler divergence that depends only on the observable gradient component of the error, tightening the standard Girsanov bound for generic score networks, and identifying its looseness as the cost of operating on path-space rather than marginal-space dynamics. Third, we give a tractable estimator of the gradient component via a dual Sobolev identity, which is shown to empirically correlate substantially better with sample quality than the full $L^2$ error.

Despite the empirical success of score-based diffusion models, a complete theoretical understanding of how finite-sample learning, network parameterization, and numerical discretization jointly dictate generative quality remains underdeveloped. Existing sampling analyses often evaluate the generative performance conditional on an oracle score or a pre-specified error threshold. In this work, we establish a unified convergence and generalization framework for score-based diffusion models parameterized by practical ResNet-type architectures. We analyze the generalization and convergence properties from the practical finite-sample, discrete-time learning problem of the score function to the ideal continuous-time, population-level objective. Based on the generalization result of the learning problem of score function, we analyze the sampling process induced by the learned score function and provide an end-to-end total variation distance estimate for the generated terminal distribution. This estimate explicitly decomposes the overall generative error into four interpretable components: the truncation error of the forward process, the reverse-time discretization error, the generalization error incorporating both finite data and forward-time discretization, and the training optimization gap. Our results quantitatively characterize how the training sample size, temporal discretization grids, and optimization accuracy jointly control the final fidelity of samples generated by diffusion models.

Practical diffusion sampling is a numerical approximation problem: under a fixed inference budget, one must simulate a reverse-time ODE or SDE using only a limited number of denoising steps, so discretization error is often the dominant source of error. Existing non-asymptotic analyses provide convergence guarantees, but are typically too loose and too insensitive to diffusion parameters to guide practical design: broad families of schedules receive the same rates, which depend on coarse worst-case quantities such as the dimension or the drift Lipschitz constant. We take a less ambitious but more informative route. In the exact-score setting, we derive first-order asymptotic expansions of the Euler-Maruyama weak and Fréchet discretization errors. These formulas hold for general smooth reverse diffusions and become fully explicit under Gaussian data. They show how discretization error adapts to the geometry of the data through the covariance spectrum, and how this geometry interacts with key diffusion parameters, including the diffusion schedules and the diffusion-term coefficient. This yields tractable objectives for geometry-aware parameter optimization. Finally, we show that the qualitative predictions of the Gaussian formulas remain robust across diffusion sampling problems with different geometries, including image generation on different datasets and image posterior sampling.