Identifiability and Stability of Generative Drifting with Companion-Elliptic Kernel Families

Lee, HakGeun, Chun, Hyonho

arXiv.org Machine Learning 

This paper studies the identifiability and stability of drifting fields within the framework of Generative Modeling via Drifting. The motivating question is whether a zero-drift equilibrium identifies the target distribution, and whether an approximate zero drift implies weak distributional convergence. Since the original drifting model employs the Laplace kernel by default, we first analyze why standard Gaussian score-based arguments fail to apply. This analysis motivates the introduction of companion-elliptic kernel families, which are characterized by a companion potential satisfying an elliptic closure relation. We show that this class naturally contains the Laplace kernel and consists precisely of Gaussian and Matérn kernels with smoothness parameter $ν\ge 1/2$. Within this class, we establish field identifiability for arbitrary Borel probability measures on $\mathbb{R}^d$: if the drifting field vanishes identically, then the two measures must coincide. As for stability, we demonstrate that field convergence alone does not guarantee weak convergence, since mass may escape to infinity while remaining invisible to the field. Although tightness of the sequence directly removes this obstruction and restores weak stability, we prove that, even without tightness, every $C_0$-vague cluster point lies exactly on the defect ray $\{cp:0\le c\le1\}$. Consequently, a single scalar $C_0$-observable suffices to detect the missing mass and recover weak convergence.