  Are spinodal instabilities the leading mechanism in the fragmentation of a
fermionic system? Numerous experimental indications suggest such a scenario and
stimulated much effort in giving a suitable description, without being
finalised in a dedicated transport model.
  On the one hand, the bulk character of spinodal behaviour requires an
accurate treatment of the one-body dynamics, in presence of mechanical
instabilities. On the other hand, pure mean-field implementations do not apply
to situations where instabilities, bifurcations and chaos are present. The
evolution of instabilities should be treated in a large-amplitude framework
requiring fluctuations of Langevin type.
  We present new stochastic approaches constructed by requiring a thorough
description of the mean-field response in presence of instabilities. Their
particular relevance is an improved description of the spinodal fragmentation
mechanism at the threshold, where the instability growth is frustrated by the
mean-field resilience.
