Attraction, Repulsion, and Friction: Introducing DMF, a Friction-Augmented Drifting Model

Iterative generative models such as Flow Matching and Diffusion models have demonstrated strong test-time scaling behavior, where additional inference computation can improve generation quality. In contrast, Drift Models offer efficient one-step generation, but their direct generation paradigm limits such flexibility. In this work, we propose Drift Flow Matching (DFM), a framework that connects drifting generative modeling with flow-based iterative generation. DFM preserves the efficiency of direct transport maps while enabling generation to be refined through multiple inference steps when desired. This bridges the gap between one-step Drift Models and multi-step Flow Matching methods, and provides a novel generative paradigm that can adapt sampling computation to different quality--efficiency requirements. Extensive experiments across different tasks and datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed framework.

Drifting Models have emerged as a new paradigm for one-step generative modeling, achieving strong image quality without iterative inference. The premise is to replace the iterative denoising process in diffusion models with a single evaluation of a generator. However, this creates a different trade-off: drifting reduces inference cost by moving much of the computation into training. We introduce DriftXpress, an accelerated formulation of drifting models based on projected RKHS fields. DriftXpress approximates the drifting kernel in a low-rank feature space. This preserves the attraction-repulsion structure of the original drifting field while reducing the cost of field evaluation. Across image-generation benchmarks, DriftXpress achieves comparable FID to standard drifting while reducing wall-clock training cost. These results show that the training-inference trade-off of drifting models can be pushed further without giving up their one-step inference advantage.

Drifting models are a recent class of one-step generative models that evolve the model distribution during training using a predefined sample-based drift field. Although they avoid iterative inference, their kernel-based drift fields induce frequency-dependent training dynamics: In the linearized regime, each Fourier mode of the density residual decays at a rate determined by the kernel spectrum, leading to slow recovery of fine-scale structure. We propose Second-Order Drifting Models, which lift drifting dynamics into phase space by augmenting generated samples with artificial velocity variables. We show that the resulting density perturbations obey accelerated second-order dynamics in Fourier space, connecting drifting models to the celebrated Nesterov acceleration from optimization theory. This provides a principled mechanism for mitigating the spectral stiffness of first-order drifting while preserving one-step inference. We derive a practical semi-implicit training algorithm and evaluate it on synthetic distribution matching, sequential data generation, and robotic control. Across these settings, the second-order drifting model improves convergence behavior and achieves competitive or superior performance over first-order drifting baselines.