Accelerating Redshift-Conditioned Galaxy Image Synthesis with One-step Generative Modeling

Abstract

Understanding galaxy morphology evolution across cosmic time requires models that can generate realistic galaxy populations conditioned on redshift. In this work, we study efficient redshift-conditioned generative modeling for astrophysical image synthesis using diffusion models and pixel-MeanFlow. We first review the connections between score-based diffusion models, Flow Matching, one-step generative models, and modern diffusion samplers. We then evaluate DDPM, DDIM, DEIS-AB2, DPM++2M, and one-step pixel-MeanFlow on the GalaxiesML-64 dataset using morphology-based metrics, including ellipticity, semi-major axis, Sérsic index, and isophotal area. Our results show a clear accuracy-efficiency trade-off: standard DDPM sampling achieves the best distributional fidelity but requires high computational cost, while second-order samplers substantially improve efficiency over DDIM. Pixel-MeanFlow enables single-step generation and achieves competitive performance on several morphology statistics, though it remains weaker than many-step DDPM for fine-grained structure. Our results demonstrate that one-step generative models can recover key galaxy morphology statistics at orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost, opening a path toward efficient conditional simulators for large cosmological surveys and simulation-based scientific inference.