cs.CVSep 27, 2025

Stochastic Interpolants via Conditional Dependent Coupling

Authors: Chenrui Ma, Xi Xiao, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Yanning Shen

Organizations: University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA · University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294, USA · Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, USA

Abstract

Existing image generation models face critical challenges regarding the trade-off between computation and fidelity. Specifically, models relying on a pretrained Variational Autoencoder (VAE) suffer from information loss, limited detail, and the inability to support end-to-end training. In contrast, models operating directly in the pixel space incur prohibitive computational cost. Although cascade models can mitigate computational cost, stage-wise separation prevents effective end-to-end optimization, hampers knowledge sharing, and often results in inaccurate distribution learning within each stage. To address these challenges, we introduce a unified multi-stage generative framework formulated under the stochastic interpolant formalism with our Conditional Dependent Coupling strategy as a Flow-Matching variant. It decomposes the generative process into interpolant trajectories at multiple stages, ensuring accurate distribution learning while enabling end-to-end optimization. Importantly, the entire process is modeled as a single unified Diffusion Transformer, eliminating the need for disjoint modules and also enabling knowledge sharing. Under explicitly stated assumptions, we provably reduce both transport cost and asymptotic inference time; we empirically validate the underlying NFE-transport-cost and per-evaluation-cost relations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive fidelity and substantially lower wall-clock cost in the low-NFE regime across multiple resolutions.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables10 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Oct 6, 2026

Global Transport Couplings for Classifier-Free Guided Flows

Optimal-transport couplings have been shown to reduce training variance in unconditional flow models, but their role in conditional generation remains unclear. A natural approach constructs separate couplings for each condition, but this is impractical for large or continuous conditioning spaces found in modern image foundation models. We introduce Global Transport (GT), a global class-agnostic optimal-transport coupling, computed without class labels. GT can associate different conditions with different regions of the source noise, and consequently worsens performance without guidance. However, when combined with classifier-free guidance (CFG), GT consistently improves generation across domains, model scales, and sampling budgets. This reversal suggests that couplings for conditional flows should be evaluated both empirically and theoretically under the guided flow used at inference, rather than on unguided generation. We evaluate GT over both discrete class and continuous text conditioned image generation across model scales, and investigate how coupling choice alters guided trajectories. These results identify coupling design in the guided flow setting as a simple training time axis to improve performance without modifying existing architectures, samplers, or guidance mechanisms.
Jun 18, 2026

UNITY: Attention Flow Networks for Adaptive Conditioning in Diffusion

We introduce UNITY, a Universal-to-Specialized adapter for efficient and scalable composite conditioning in diffusion based image generation. Unlike prior methods that train separate adapters for each conditioning modality, UNITY jointly learns shared semantics across multiple conditioning types and subsequently specializes without modifying the underlying architecture. The proposed two stage training paradigm consists of a Universal Stage that captures cross modal representations across all conditioning modalities using half of the total training steps, followed by a Specialization Stage that refines modality specific features using the remaining training budget. At the core of UNITY are the Morphable Attention Flow (MAF) Network and Morph Wrapper modules, which enable channel aware and spatially adaptive feature alignment through learnable flow fields and attention based fusion. This constant complexity formulation supports flexible operation under both single and composite conditioning settings while significantly reducing inference latency and memory consumption. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that UNITY achieves state of the art image fidelity while maintaining superior memory efficiency. Code: https://github.com/arya-domain/UNITY
Oct 9, 2026

InstantFusion: A Shared Latent Interface for Heterogeneous Image Generators

Diffusion/flow models have emerged as the de facto paradigms for image generation, giving rise to a diverse family of modern generators with increasingly heterogeneous architectures and representations. Despite their remarkable generation capabilities, the cross-model alignment of latent representations and the consistency of their underlying denoising dynamics remain underexplored. In this work, we uncover an intriguing cross-model compatibility: independently trained generators exhibit similar latent spatial organization, while directly handing off intermediate states between unaligned models can still preserve coarse visual content. Motivated by these observations, we propose InstantFusion, a lightweight shared latent interface that connects the denoising trajectories of heterogeneous image generators. Specifically, to enable flexible cross-model state translation, model-specific Latent AutoEncoders (LAEs) are introduced to project intermediate states from different generators into a shared latent space and decode them into the latent space of a target generator. This shared space is constrained by two complementary objectives: aligning intermediate states derived from the same image at matched noise levels and synchronizing their corresponding local denoising velocities. Once trained, InstantFusion allows denoising to seamlessly transition across frozen generators without requiring a dedicated mapping for every model pair. The versatility of InstantFusion is demonstrated across acceleration, multi-preference composition, cross-architecture on-policy distillation, and cross-model composition, achieving competitive performance across these diverse settings.