Computational methods for learning to sample from the Boltzmann distribution-- where the target distribution is known only up to an unnormalized energy function-- have advanced significantly recently. Due to the lack of explicit target samples, however, prior diffusion-based methods, known as diffusion samplers, often require importance-weighted estimation or complicated learning processes.

Computational methods for learning to sample from the Boltzmann distribution -- where the target distribution is known only up to an unnormalized energy function -- have advanced significantly recently. Due to the lack of explicit target samples, however, prior diffusion-based methods, known as diffusion samplers, often require importance-weighted estimation or complicated learning processes. Both trade off scalability with extensive evaluations of the energy and model, thereby limiting their practical usage. In this work, we propose Adjoint Schrödinger Bridge Sampler (ASBS), a new diffusion sampler that employs simple and scalable matching-based objectives yet without the need to estimate target samples during training. ASBS is grounded on a mathematical model -- the Schrödinger Bridge -- which enhances sampling efficiency via kinetic-optimal transportation. Through a new lens of stochastic optimal control theory, we demonstrate how SB-based diffusion samplers can be learned at scale via Adjoint Matching and prove convergence to the global solution. Notably, ASBS generalizes the recent Adjoint Sampling (Havens et al., 2025) to arbitrary source distributions by relaxing the so-called memoryless condition that largely restricts the design space. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of ASBS on sampling from classical energy functions, amortized conformer generation, and molecular Boltzmann distributions.

We consider the generative problem of sampling from an unknown distribution for which only a sufficiently large number of training samples are available. In this paper, we build on previous work combining Schrödinger bridges and Langevin dynamics. A key bottleneck of this approach is the exponential dependence of the required training samples on the dimension, d, of the ambient state space. We propose a localization strategy which exploits conditional independence of conditional expectation values. Localization thus replaces a single high-dimensional Schrödinger bridge problem by d low-dimensional Schrödinger bridge problems over the available training samples. As for the original approach, the localized sampler is stable and geometric ergodic. The sampler also naturally extends to conditional sampling and to Bayesian inference. We demonstrate the performance of our proposed scheme through experiments on a Gaussian problem with increasing dimensions and on a stochastic subgrid-scale parametrization conditional sampling problem. Keywords: generative modeling, Langevin dynamics, Schrödinger bridges, conditional independence, localization, Bayesian inference, conditional sampling, multi-scale closure AMS: 60H10,62F15,62F30,65C05,65C40 1. Introduction In this paper, we consider the problem of sampling from an unknown probability measure ν(dx) on R