cs.LGAug 3, 2026

Beckmann Transport Models: From Autonomous Flows to One-Step Maps

Authors: Lee Cheuk-KitFlorentin CoeurdouxYuyuan ChenSophia TangPeter PotaptchikYilun DuMichael Samuel AlbergoEric Vanden-Eijnden

Organizations: 1Harvard University · 2Capital Fund Management · University of Pennsylvania · University of Oxford · 4New York University

Abstract

We propose an instantiation of flow matching that relies on a time-independent velocity field (an \emph{autonomous flow}) to exactly map between two distributions, so long as the target is singular, i.e.\ supported on a lower-dimensional data manifold. We also show that the one-step generative map associated with this flow is the unique solution of a simple conservation equation, which can be used to learn the map directly from samples. These autonomous flows and maps give a dynamical meaning to the flux constraint of Beckmann's transportation problem. Their construction provides a unifying framework that recovers, for instance, the closed-form Poisson-flow generative model and equilibrium matching with a quadratic flow-matching regression loss. We illustrate how this theory corrects inconsistencies in existing methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of the autonomous flow and the one-step map on ImageNet 256x256.

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