One-step generative modeling has emerged as a leading approach to amortize the inference cost of diffusion and flow-matching models. Among distillation-free methods, MeanFlow training is notoriously unstable, with non-decreasing loss and unbounded gradient variance. In this work, we establish a theory that attributes this pathology to a misuse of the conditional velocity field: it plays two distinct statistical roles in the loss, both as an unbiased regression target and as a Monte Carlo control variate inside a Jacobi-vector product, with the original loss assigning the wrong coefficient to the latter. We derive the optimal coefficient in closed form, and show that a family of fixes in concurrent works corresponds to different practical realizations of the same optimum. A controlled sweep of this coefficient on two-dimensional benchmarks and on a latent Diffusion Transformer recovers the predicted bias-variance ordering. The optimal coefficient yields up to a %54 improvement in sample quality on two-dimensional benchmarks and a monotone FID trend at every matched-step DiT checkpoint. Crucially, the same DiT measurement also reveals a quantitative FID-MSE landscape mismatch: although gradient variance is minimized at an interior coefficient value, the coefficient that minimizes FID prefers the direct use of conditional velocity.

Persistence diagrams provide stable, interpretable summaries of geometric and topological structure and are useful for simulation-based inference when low-order statistics miss key information. Yet persistence-based pipelines require hand-chosen filtrations, vectorizations, and compressors, typically without an objective tied to parameter uncertainty. We introduce \textbf{TopoFisher}, a differentiable persistent-homology pipeline that learns topological summaries by maximizing local Gaussian Fisher information. Using simulations near a fiducial parameter, TopoFisher optimizes trainable filtrations, diagram vectorizations, and compressors without posterior samples or supervised regression targets, while retaining stable topological inductive bias. We also give sufficient regularity conditions for the log-determinant Fisher loss to be locally Lipschitz in trainable parameters. Controlled experiments on noisy spirals and Gaussian random fields, where total Fisher information is known, show that TopoFisher recovers much of the available information and outperforms fixed topological vectorizations. Our main results are on weak gravitational lensing, a high-dimensional non-Gaussian cosmological field-inference problem. Learned topological summaries reach higher Fisher information than state-of-the-art cosmological summaries and approach an unconstrained Information Maximising Neural Network baseline with up to $\sim80\times$ fewer parameters. The learned filtrations also generalize better: under simulator shift from lognormal to LPT-based maps it retains most Fisher information, while the neural baseline drops, and in neural posterior estimation they give tighter constraints than the neural baseline, and of state-of-the-art cosmological summaries. These results support Fisher-based topological optimization as a robust, parameter-efficient front end for simulation-based inference.

Figure 1: (a) Precision (blue) and recall (orange) for Figure 2: (a) Real data covers five modes (1-5) and several neighborhood sizes k. Both metrics were evaluated using 20k real and of varying sample count. Figure 1a illustrates the effect of varying k in the setup used in Figure 4b of the submission (truncation sweep 4 in StyleGAN, VGG-16 features, 50k samples). In general, different k yield consistent results and affect mainly the 5 saturation towards 0 or 1. Therefore, selecting k is a tradeoff between under-or overestimating the manifolds.

Diffusion models are central to modern generative modeling, and understanding how they balance memorization and generalization is critical for reliable deployment. Recent work has shown that memorization in diffusion models is shaped by training dynamics, with generalization and memorization emerging at different stages of training. However, deployed diffusion models are often further distilled, introducing an additional training phase whose impact on memorization is not well understood. In this work, we analyze how distillation reshapes memorization behavior in diffusion models, taking consistency distillation as a representative framework. Empirically, we show that when applied to a teacher model that has memorized data, consistency distillation significantly reduces transferred memorization in the student while preserving, and sometimes improving, sample quality. To explain this behavior, we provide a theoretical analysis using a random feature neural network model [Bonnaire et al., 2025], showing that consistency distillation suppresses unstable feature directions associated with memorization while preserving stable, generalizable modes. Our findings suggest that distillation can serve not only as an acceleration tool, but also as a mechanism for improving the memorization-generalization trade-off.

The upper bound of gradient's Frobenius norm for spectrally-normalized discriminators follows directly. As lw(x) is a linear transformation, we have lcw(x) = c lw(x), and lw(cx) = c lw(x). Moreover, since ReLU and leaky ReLU is linear in R+ and R region, we have ai(cx) = c ai(x). In this section we discuss the gradients with respect the actual parameter wi. From Eq. (12) in [30] we know wtDθ(x) = A, we know that w0tDθ(x) F, otl(x)Dθ(x), and kotl (x)k have upper bounds. From Theorem 1.1 in [44] we know that if wt is initialized with i.i.d random variables from uniform or Gaussian distribution, E kwtkspis lower bounded away from zero at initialization. So k wtDθ(x)kF is upper bounded at initialization. Moreover, we observe empirically that kwtksp is usually increasing during training. Therefore, k wtDθ(x)kF is typically upper bounded during training as well. The following proposition states that spectral normalization also gives an upper bound on kHwi(Dθ)(x)ksp for networks with ReLU or leaky ReLU internal activations.

Privacy Assessment on Reconstructed Images: Are Existing Evaluation Metrics Faithful to Human Perception? In Section 4.1, we briefly introduced how humans annotate the reconstructed images for different datasets. In the supplementary material, we have included a graphical user interface (GUI) that was utilized by the annotators. Figure 1 displays the GUI, where (A) and (B) were specifically designed for annotating different datasets. To minimize the influence of subjective bias, we use a relatively objective formulation: whether the reconstructed image can be correctly labeled.