Few-Step Generation

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4 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-21

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Few-Step Generation.

Period ending 2026-09-07

5 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Few-Step Generation.

61 papers

Latest in Few-Step Generation

Sep 15, 2026cs.CV

Zing-0.5: Toward Playable Worlds with Real-Time Joint Action and Text Control

We introduce Zing-0.5, a 5B autoregressive world model designed for playability: users can explore generated worlds, influence unfolding events, and respond to the resulting feedback through joint keyboard and online text control. Our approach brings together three technical contributions: (1) Unified action and text conditioning, combining magnitude-aware keyboard inputs with temporally aligned text instructions and jointly annotated videos to learn navigation and event control within the same sequence; (2) Event-scale supervision for incremental generation, using a segment-level teacher trained on connected multi-prompt videos to supervise a block-level causal student through distribution-matching distillation; and (3) Low-cost real-time interaction, combining four-step generation with context-preserving streaming to support 832 x 480 inference at 24 FPS at an estimated server rental cost of approximately USD 0.009 per stream-minute. Zing-0.5 achieves an overall score of 81.0 and a consistency score of 88.5 across 158 WBench Navigation cases. A joint-control demonstration shows a text-directed event change during continued navigation without restarting generation. We release the model weights, inference code, and Zing-SGLang serving implementation to support further work on playable generated worlds.
Mingyang Chen, Shengdong Chen, Xiaoxiao Fu +13
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Discrete Beckmann Transport Models for One-Step Language Modeling and Reasoning

Discrete diffusion and flow models are a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, but compressing many-step sampling into fewer steps typically requires distilling a pretrained teacher model. This caps the student at the teacher's quality and requires a costly two-stage training pipeline. We introduce Discrete Beckmann Transport Models (DBTM), built on a time-independent flow whose autonomous transport map provably carries any point in the ambient space to a fixed point on the vertices of the simplex in a single step. We show that this fixed-point property is characterized by a conservation equation whose residual can be minimized directly from data, removing the requirement for a teacher flow and time conditioning. Under this construction, a partially trained map corresponds to the flow truncated at finite time, so generation reduces to iterating one map until it reaches a fixed point. We further extend the map to a partial-context interpolant where additional function evaluations act as refinement steps rather than ODE integration steps. On language modeling and reasoning tasks, DBTM enables one- and few-step generation that improves quality and accuracy over discrete diffusion and continuous flow baselines.
Sophia Tang, Shiyi Wang
Sep 3, 2026cs.CV

FlashRender: Few-Step Generative Rendering via Camera-Controlled Video MeanFlow

We present FlashRender, a few-step generative rendering framework that retakes a source video along a target camera trajectory in seconds. We identify sampling-step-dependent camera control as a prominent manifestation of discretization error in existing multi-step generative rendering models and show that resolving this inconsistency substantially lowers denoising trajectory curvature, facilitating subsequent step distillation. To this end, we introduce Representation Transformation and Alignment (RETA), which aligns hidden source-video representations with target-video features from a frozen visual geometry model. This directly encodes the geometric transformation within the source-video stream, enabling sampling-step-consistent camera control. We then fine-tune the model with the MeanFlow objective on the lower-curvature denoising trajectory induced by RETA, allowing the model to more effectively address discretization error. Finally, we apply on-policy flow map distillation to correct self-rollout errors under fixed few-step sampling. Extensive experiments show that RETA, MeanFlow, and on-policy flow map distillation play complementary roles in few-step generative rendering. Together, they enable our approach to match multi-step baselines in video quality and geometric consistency at 25x lower sampling cost while achieving superior camera controllability, even under out-of-distribution target camera trajectories.
Byeongjun Park, Byung-Hoon Kim, Hyungjin Chung
Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

A Lagrangian View of Flow Matching

Modern explicit-time generative models, such as Flow Matching [Lipman et al., 2023] and Rectified Flow [Liu et al., 2023], are typically derived top-down via Optimal Transport and the continuity equation. This standard Eulerian approach focuses on the macroscopic transport of probability mass. In this paper, we present an alternative, bottom-up mechanical derivation grounded in a Lagrangian (particle-centric) perspective. By analyzing the local Taylor expansion of a continuous denoiser, we motivate a strict invariance condition required for optimal, singlestep generation: the conservation of target identity. Enforcing this condition yields a governing quasi-linear advection Partial Differential Equation (PDE). We demonstrate that solving this PDE via the Method of Characteristics analytically yields the straight-line trajectories of Flow Matching. This geometric perspective isolates the Jacobian of the denoiser as the primary source of trajectory curvature, providing a direct mathematical explanation for why straight-line flows enable massive step sizes, and why empirical models require distillation to flatten intersecting characteristics.
Peyman Milanfar
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

GeoFlow: Efficient Driving Video Generation via Geometry-Aligned Priors

Generative models like Diffusion Models and Flow Matching have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in synthesizing high-fidelity driving videos, but are severely constrained by high inference latency due to the requirement of extensive sampling steps. We argue that this inefficiency stems from the prevailing reliance on a standard Gaussian source distribution, where consecutive frames are initialized as independent Gaussian noise. This paradigm disregards the rich spatiotemporal correlations inherent in driving videos, compelling the model to regenerate deterministic scene structures existing in previous frames from noise, which is both computationally redundant and prone to geometric inconsistency. To address this problem, we propose GeoFlow, a novel framework designed to achieve efficient driving video generation by harnessing explicit geometric priors. Instead of sampling from standard Gaussian noise, we leverage multi-view geometry and spatially-adaptive noise injection to construct a Geometry-Aligned Prior (GAP) distribution as starting point. This initialization bridges the gap between source distribution and data distribution, yielding a significantly straighter and shorter sampling trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoFlow can achieve remarkable efficiency of both training and inference: merely several hours of fine-tuning on baseline models can significantly boost few-step generation quality, while fully converged training drastically reduces number of inference steps required for state-of-the-art video generation.
Jiazheng Liu, Hang Li, Jiawei Zhang +5
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

Stream Forcing: Constructing Unified Training Trajectory for Robust Streaming Video Generation

Streaming video generation holds strong potential for world modeling, where future frames must be inferred online sequentially to form a continuous video stream. However, streaming video diffusion models introduce a fundamental train-inference mismatch: inference follows a specialized denoising order, whereas advanced training strategies typically require diverse noise-level configurations. To address this trade-off between train-inference consistency and training coverage, we reformulate the video diffusion sampling as a frame-indexed stochastic process over noise levels. Within this stochastic process space, we construct a continuous training trajectory along which the sampling schedule progressively evolves from independent sampling to inference-consistent sampling. We further introduce a joint calibration algorithm and a temporal correlative sampling algorithm to ensure trajectory smoothness and cross-frame correlation. Building on these designs, we propose Stream Forcing, a unified training framework for streaming video generation that balances training sufficiency and inference efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Stream Forcing significantly improves generation quality with a 36.6% FVD improvement on the UCF-101 benchmark. Furthermore, our method facilitates robust zero-shot extrapolation to long-horizon video generation with a 27.9% FVD improvement on the UCF-101 benchmark.
Yueting Zhu, Yuehao Song, Kaicheng Zhang +5
Aug 6, 2026cs.CV

Hierarchical Flow Matching for 3D Point Cloud Generation

Generating high-quality 3D point clouds requires capturing both global shape topology and local geometric details. Existing flow-based methods rely on continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) that demand expensive ODE solving and trace estimation during training, while diffusion models require hundreds of iterative denoising steps. Moreover, most approaches adopt single-level generation directly in point space, disregarding the hierarchical structure natural to 3D shapes. We propose Hierarchical Flow Matching (HFM) that extends flow matching to bilevel structure for unconditional 3D point cloud generation. HFM decomposes the task into two levels via optimal-transport flow matching: a \textit{Latent Flow Matching} models the global shape manifold in a compact latent space, and a \textit{Conditional Point Flow Matching} reconstructs detailed point clouds conditioned on the latent code. Both flows are trained with simple MSE regression losses. The resulting straight OT paths enable efficient sampling with as few as 15 Euler steps per flow, while the structured latent space supports downstream tasks including classification. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet and ModelNet benchmarks demonstrate that HFM achieves competitive or even best performance compared with prior state-of-the-art methods.
Linhao Wang, Qichang Zhang, Ye Su +1
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

DAC-Pose: Dual-Agent Collaborative Framework for Pose-Guided Human Generation

AI agents have emerged as a powerful new paradigm in generative image synthesis, enabling systems to perform complex semantic reasoning rather than passive pixel-level mapping. In pose-guided human generation, conventional methods inevitably produce severe visual artifacts under drastic viewpoint shifts, fundamentally because they lack the cognitive capacity to logically deduce unseen regions and model complex spatial deformations. To bridge this gap, we propose DAC-Pose, a novel agent-driven multimodal framework that reformulates single-view human generation as a collaborative dual-agent system. DAC-Pose integrates two complementary components, namely, the Prior Semantic Reasoning (PSR) agent and the Discrepancy-Aware Visual Encoding (DAVE) agent. Functioning as a cognitive engine, PSR utilizes collaborative reasoning to deduce the fine-grained attributes of unseen regions. Concurrently, acting as a specialized visual perception agent, DAVE quantifies and encodes viewpoint-induced spatial misalignments, continuously feeding robust spatial constraints back into the generative process. This autonomous feedback loop between semantic deduction and visual perception ensures high-fidelity detail synthesis. Extensive experiments on the DeepFashion and Market-1501 benchmarks validate the superiority of our agent-driven paradigm. Notably, DAC-Pose excels in preserving texture alignment and identity consistency under drastic viewpoint changes. The code is available at https://github.com/AIVRC/DAC-Pose.
Haotian Yang, Zhile Yang, Huiyu Zhou +1
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

MT-Web2Code: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Multi-Turn Regional Reconstruction and Localized Modification

Recent advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in web UI generation. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on single-turn full-page generation from scratch, overlooking the iterative workflow of real-world frontend engineering, where developers repeatedly reconstruct missing regions and modify localized elements within existing codebases. To bridge this gap, we introduce MT-Web2Code, the first multimodal coding benchmark for multi-turn Macro-Level Regional Reconstruction and Micro-Level Localized Modification, which contains 102 tasks spanning 16 vertical domains. To construct deterministic repair trajectories without costly turn-level human annotation, we develop a scalable Reverse-Corruption Trajectory Engine that iteratively injects structural and stylistic defects into golden pages. We further propose a dual-axis evaluation protocol that measures target-region fidelity and the preservation of unaffected content, where regional reconstruction is assessed by a 5-dimensional VLM-based rubric and localized modification by deterministic pixel-grounded alignment. Experiments on 13 frontier coding agents reveal that current agents struggle to faithfully reconstruct target regions while preserving unaffected content, lack fine-grained visual-code alignment for localized edits, and suffer from error snowballing over multiple turns. Beyond benchmarking, our deterministic evaluation metrics provide fine-grained feedback signals that may facilitate future research on training iterative UI coding agents. Our evaluation code and data will soon be released.
Qiming Li, Shujie Hu, Haohan Liu +3
Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

Latent-Kernel Discrete Flow Maps for Few-Step Generation

Discrete diffusion and flow-matching models denoise a sequence over many steps, but to keep each step cheap, they factorize the transition across positions and decide every token independently. This makes few-step generation challenging for text when the target couples two positions, such as a subject and a verb that must agree. An independent update commits to them separately, and many function evaluations are spent repairing the mismatch. Existing few-step methods buy back the lost correlation by distilling or rectifying a slow teacher, and so inherit the teacher's quality ceiling. We ask instead whether a model can express correlated steps natively, and answer with Latent-Kernel Discrete Flow Maps (LKF), a from-scratch flow-map kernel that is a mixture of M factorized components tied by a single shared latent. Conditioned on the latent, each component is cheap, and the mixture is summed over the latent in closed form for small M. We show that a single step places mass on correlated completions with the same sampling time complexity as a factorized model, since one latent is drawn per sequence and reused across the entire denoising trajectory. We also show that the Masked Diffusion Language Model (MDLM) is a special case of our LKF model at M=1. The experiments for unconditional text generation on the One-Billion-Word (LM1B) and WikiText-103 benchmarks show that our LKF model learns strongly heterogeneous components and improves generative perplexity by 2.1x to 3.3x over the likelihood baselines without losing diversity. The gain grows with M, and at M=8, it surpasses distilled and rectified few-step samplers. The source code is available at: https://github.com/mansoor181/lkf.git
Mansoor Ahmed, Yue-Tsz Fan, Hemanth Venkateswara +1
Jul 29, 2026cs.CV

LeapTalk: Breaking the Latency-Quality Trade-off in Talking Head Generation

Long-form and real-time talking-head generation remains challenging due to a latency-quality trade-off: inefficient multi-step diffusion prohibits streaming generation, whereas real-time autoregressive approaches suffer from error accumulation and identity drift. To address this drawback, we propose LeapTalk, a novel framework that achieves stable and real-time talking-head generation with a single forward step, scaling to arbitrarily long videos. At the heart of our approach lies a single-step bridge distillation scheme. On the one hand, departing from the conventional noise-to-data paradigm, we introduce a data-to-data transport formulation based on a Brownian bridge. Anchored by a persistent reference, this strategy effectively mitigates identity drift and enhances long-term temporal stability. On the other hand, to enable smooth knowledge transfer from a pre-trained diffusion teacher to the student bridge model, we explore a heterogeneous distillation framework with an SNR-aligned time transformation Φ(τ)Φ(τ), which bridges the functional discrepancy between the two models. Moreover, we propose an audio-driven classifier-free guidance mechanism to maintain fine-grained lip synchronization under extreme step reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves high-fidelity and temporally consistent video generation with only 1 step at up to 200 FPS, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both efficiency and stability. Project Page: https://zhangrongxiang.github.io/leaptalk-page/
Rongxiang Zhang, Songhua Liu
Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

Parallel Decoding Distillation for Fast Image and Video Generation

Generation in video diffusion or flow models is computationally expensive due to the slow and iterative sampling process. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) acceleration methods heavily rely on variational score distillation (VSD) and adversarial losses to distill diffusion models into few-step generators. Albeit achieving high-quality video generation, these training losses are notoriously hard to optimize and suffer from mode collapse, leading to loss of video diversity and lack of motion. In this paper, we introduce Parallel Decoding Distillation (PDD), a simplified and scalable trajectory-based distillation method for fast inference of diffusion and flow matching models. Our architecture and training procedure are compatible with any pre-trained model and support sampling with a varying number of function evaluations (NFE). PDD accelerates generation by predicting multiple denoising steps per network evaluation. Conceptually, it learns a representation of the mean velocity without regressing its derivative using JVPs or finite-difference approximations. Our method achieves SOTA performance with 4-8 NFE on LTX-2.3 Text-to-Video/Audio, Wan 14B Text-to-Video, and Qwen-Image Text-to-Image. Moreover, PDD presents a significant improvement in generated video diversity.
Neta Shaul, Chao Liu, Arash Vahdat +1
Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

AptAvatar: Fast and Vivid Long-Form Audio-Driven Video Generation for Production-Ready Avatars

Production-ready audio-driven avatar generation requires efficient inference without sacrificing fidelity or motion expressiveness. However, existing acceleration methods often compromise quality through restrictive architectural choices, such as causal attention and short temporal horizons, or by reducing model capacity and resolution. Without such compromises, we propose AptAvatar, a 14B-parameter long-form audio-driven avatar generation framework that delivers fast and expressive inference. For efficiency in production-level applications, AptAvatar addresses the extreme two-step generation challenge. To bridge the gap between the multi-step teacher model and the two-step student model, we introduce Endpoint-Anchored Distribution Distillation. It augments vanilla distribution matching with a dedicated Anchor Score Estimator trained on the trajectory-endpoint distribution defined from a frozen pretrained 4-step bridge generator. This provides an attainable endpoint-level anchor for the evolving two-step student. To improve long-horizon consistency, we further introduce Self-Generated History Replay, which reuses cached outputs from earlier generator checkpoints as history conditions during chunk-wise training. This approximates inference-time conditioning on self-generated histories without costly online rollouts, mitigating quality degradation from accumulated history errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AptAvatar generates vivid 720p long-form avatar videos with only 2 NFEs, achieving a 60x speedup while preserving visual fidelity and long-horizon identity. Code is available at https://github.com/TaoLiveAIGC/AptAvatar
Hengyuan Zhang, Jingna Sun, Meiguang Jin +1
Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

Ms. Forcing: Efficient Streaming Video Generation with Multi-Scale Patchification and Attention

Streaming video diffusion models have made substantial progress toward interactive and dynamic world simulation, but the nested autoregressive and denoising loops of conventional next-frame generation hinder real-time deployment. Recent rolling-window methods pipeline denoising across multiple consecutive frames at different noise levels, improving throughput and long-horizon stability. However, they tokenize every state at the same fine spatial granularity, leaving substantial noise-dependent redundancy in the joint denoising window. We propose Ms.Forcing, an efficient streaming video generation paradigm that adapts spatial granularity to each state's noise level. Its Multi-Scale Patchification (MSP) assigns coarser patches to noisier states, reducing the active-window token count by 45%, while Multi-Scale Self-Attention (MSSA) matches the density of visible non-sink keys and values to each query scale to further reduce attention cost. Because both schedules are fixed by window position, Ms.Forcing retains a static, hardware-friendly computation graph. We further introduce Homogeneous-Noise-Level DMD (H-DMD), which assembles each fake video from clean predictions sharing the same source noise level, thereby reducing the mismatch between DMD training sequences and inference-time rollouts. The multi-scale design helps offset the additional training cost of backpropagating through overlapping windows. We include both quantitative and qualitative experiments to show that Ms.Forcing reaches 22.84 FPS on a single H200 GPU, 39.6% faster than Rolling Forcing, while significantly improving VBench scores in both short video and long video generation setting.
Zekun Li, Xiaoyan Cong, Hongyu Li +5
Jul 22, 2026cs.CL

Multi-Mask Diffusion Language Models for Few-Step Generation

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising family of language generators, but achieving high-quality few-step generation remains challenging. In MDMs, all forward trajectories collapse to a single fully masked state, leaving no terminal entropy for consistency-style few-step generation. While recent few-step alternatives based on uniform-state diffusion avoid this degeneracy, it becomes harder to distinguish clean tokens from noise than MDMs, which usually harms modeling quality and training efficiency. In this work, we propose a multi-mask diffusion model (MultiMDM) that preserves the masking structure towards few-step generation. In the forward process, each clean token is first pushed towards a designated mask and then gradually mixes over the mask set. As a result, the backward process has a drafting capability by predicting a designated mask before refining to a clean token. We derive a closed-form ELBO training objective for MultiMDM that supports continual training from pretrained MDMs. In addition, we formulate a purely discrete-state consistency distillation scheme, with a shared-Gumbel coupling to reduce pathwise entropy. Experiments on pretraining and distillation show that MultiMDM provides an effective foundation for principled few-step generation.
Sijin Chen, Yinuo Ren, Heyang Zhao +3
Jul 7, 2026cs.CV

Dynamic-in-Few-Step: Unifying Dynamic Computation and Few-Step Distillation for Efficient Video Generation

Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) have demonstrated superior generation quality but suffer from prohibitive computational costs. While recent few-step distillation techniques significantly accelerate inference, they typically enforce a static model architecture across all denoising stages, ignoring the varying computational demands inherent to different noise levels. In this work, we propose a novel post-training acceleration framework that exploits this redundancy by integrating dynamic structural sparsification directly into the distillation process. Unlike conventional post-hoc compression applied to a fixed diffusion pipeline, our approach jointly optimizes the denoising steps and structured model sparsity, transforming a pre-trained VDM into a compact, step-specific Mixture-of-Models (MoM). To address the training instability arising from this joint optimization, we introduce a Progressive Training Strategy coupled with an Output Rollout Mechanism, which ensures the coherent learning of structural decisions across timesteps. Furthermore, we develop a specialized inference engine to deploy the resulting MoM efficiently. Our method is orthogonal to existing acceleration techniques and highly effective: On Wan-14B, it removes 24% of the per-step FLOPs on top of 4-step distillation, adding a 1.2x wall-clock gain and reaching a 30x speedup over the 50-step teacher while preserving competitive generation quality.
Yu Cheng, Siyue Yao, Zhongang Qi +3
Jul 6, 2026cs.CV

MV-Forcing: Long Multi-View Video Generation via 4D-Grounded Spatio-Temporal Self-Forcing

Recent advances in video diffusion models have enabled either long single-view generation through temporal autoregression, or short multi-view synthesis through bidirectional attention. However, generating long, multi-view consistent videos of dynamic scenes remains unsolved. In this work, we present MV-Forcing, a framework that composes temporal and view-wise autoregression within a single diffusion model by introducing a 4D geometric bridge between sequentially generated views. Our key insight is that an autoregressive 3D reconstruction model naturally interfaces between autoregressively generated views. Given a completed source view, we reconstruct its 3D structure and render a geometric prior of the next target viewpoint, which the diffusion model refines into a high-quality video. To extend generation beyond the teacher's fixed temporal window, we introduce a joint denoising regime where both view slots are initialized from noise during training, enabling temporally unbounded generation. We distill the model via Distribution Matching Distillation with Spatio-Temporal Self-Forcing, closing the train-inference exposure bias gap for both temporal and view-sequential autoregression. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that MV-Forcing produces geometrically consistent multi-view videos of dynamic scenes at arbitrary lengths and viewpoint counts using a single few-step student model.
Gal Fiebelman, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Sagie Benaim
Jul 5, 2026cs.CV

Aura: Consistent Multi-Subject Video Generation via VLM-Grounded Semantic Alignment

Subject-driven and multi-element video generation are central to controllable video synthesis, but existing methods still struggle to preserve identity consistency and model complex relationships among multiple subjects. In this paper, we propose Aura, a unified framework for high-fidelity and identity-consistent video generation. To better capture scene dynamics and subject interactions, we introduce AI director-level captions that provide dense and structured descriptions of video content. We further leverage a vision-language model (VLM) with learnable queries to extract multimodal semantic features from textual and visual references, covering both global semantics and fine-grained visual cues. To bridge the representational gap between the VLM and the Diffusion Transformer (DiT), we design a two-stage alignment strategy that progressively maps VLM features into the DiT feature space. For visual conditioning, we adopt token concatenation to inject reference information directly into the generation process. To distinguish heterogeneous subject types and reduce common copy-paste artifacts, we develop a subject-aware RoPE-Shift mechanism. To further differentiate reference images of different categories, we introduce subject-aware learnable tokens. In addition, we introduce Memory Tokens to balance the training signal across examples with different numbers of reference subjects. During inference, Progressive-APG (Adaptive Prompt Guidance) further alleviates oversaturation and improves semantic alignment with user prompts. Finally, we build a high-quality video-subject image dataset through a dedicated data construction pipeline. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both single-subject generation and more challenging multi-element scenarios.
Zixiang Zhou, Zhentao Yu, Yifeng Ma +9
Jul 4, 2026cs.LG

Tensor-Train Joint Modeling for Few-Step Discrete Diffusion

Discrete diffusion promises orders-of-magnitude faster generation than autoregressive (AR) models for sequential discrete data, yet its full potential of few-step generation has remained out of reach due to a fundamental structural limitation. The conditional-independence assumption underlying current discrete diffusion models introduces a systematic parallelization bias that compounds with the number of tokens unmasked per step, becoming severe in the few-step regime that fast generation requires. We address this with the first framework for explicit joint distribution modeling in discrete diffusion via tensor decomposition, which represents the conditional clean distribution as a low-rank tensor with controllable expressivity. The framework supports both Canonical Polyadic (CPD) and Tensor-Train (TTD) decompositions, and we identify a structural bias of TTD toward dependencies between nearby tokens, formalized through Oseledets' theorem relating TT-rank to unfolding-matrix rank, which is well-suited to sequential data such as natural language and line notations for molecular data. To enable efficient generation, we present an iterative marginal inference procedure with specialization for predetermined position schedules. Our framework integrates into pretrained MDMs through lightweight fine-tuning, yielding substantial improvements in few-step generation at a fraction of the cost of training from scratch.
Byoungkwon Kim, Minhyuk Sung
Jul 3, 2026cs.CV

Perceptual Flow Matching for Few-Step Generative Modeling

We propose Perceptual Flow Matching (PFM), a simple yet effective framework for few-step generation in flow-matching models. Rather than performing velocity regression in the conventional VAE latent space, PFM supervises flow matching in a perceptual feature space using pretrained perceptual models. This simple change substantially improves the few-step generation capability of flow-matching models, reducing the number of sampling steps from 35-50 to 4-8 while preserving generation quality. Unlike existing acceleration and distillation approaches, PFM requires neither teacher models nor auxiliary score networks and can be integrated into standard flow-matching training pipelines with minimal modifications. Extensive experiments on image generation, video generation, and image editing tasks demonstrate that PFM consistently produces high-quality results while producing fewer artifacts than existing distillation-based methods. We further show that perceptual supervision shifts the regression minimizer from mean-seeking to mode-seeking, biasing predictions toward on-manifold modes that remain accurate under coarse few-step integration. Our results reveal that standard flow-matching training can naturally yield high-quality few-step generators when supervised in an appropriate representation space. We hope this insight inspires future research into representation-aware objectives for efficient generative modeling.
Chuyang Zhao, Yifei Song, Hongfa Wang +7
Jun 29, 2026cs.LG

Why Do Few-Step Text Latents Fail When Image Latents Work? Non-Commitment at Sharp Categorical Readouts

Deterministic few-step generation succeeds on continuous image latents but collapses to incoherent text on continuous text latents, and we show the cause is geometric rather than a training or scaling deficiency: a smooth, regularity-limited deterministic map cannot resolve a discrete branch choice before a sharp categorical readout, so few-step failure is governed by decoder sharpness, not transport accuracy. In the overlapping regime of real text autoencoders, we prove (Theorem 3) that the posterior-mean terminal step flips tokens at the rate of the latent mass in an O(s(t))O(s(t)) tube around decision boundaries. Two diagnostics, DABI (readout sharpness) and CCI (categorical commitment), measured on published checkpoints show that four independently built continuous-text decoders amplify a boundary-aligned perturbation far beyond a norm-matched isotropic one (DABI from 5×1025\times10^{2} to >105>10^{5}), while image decoders have DABI 1\approx 1. Two mechanisms escape the continuous bound: categorical commitment (autoregressive decoders succeed despite sharper readouts) and stochastic re-injection (deterministic ODE at K=4K=4 gives PPL 294 versus SDE 50 on the same model). In the idealized separated regime we prove matching sharp transport laws, including a dimension phase diagram: the deterministic stiffness needed to separate MM modes grows as Θ(logM)Θ(\sqrt{\log M}) once the latent dimension is Ω(logM)Ω(\log M) (and as M1/nM^{1/n} in fixed dimension), with a depth-BB hierarchy giving a B\sqrt{B}-smaller per-step peak (Theorems 5-7); a coarea identity links these to the overlapping tube (Theorem 17). The result is an accuracy-depth-stiffness tradeoff: within the deterministic-continuous class the cost is irreducible, and both escapes step outside it.
Zhongyao Wang
Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

Multi-Block Diffusion Language Models

Block Diffusion Language Models (BD-LMs) improve diffusion-based text generation with KV caching and flexible-length generation. A natural next step is to extend them from Single-Block Diffusion (SingleBD) to Multi-Block Diffusion (MultiBD), where a running-set of consecutive blocks is decoded concurrently for inter-block parallelism. However, existing BD-LMs are mostly trained under teacher forcing, where the model observes only one noisy block conditioned on a clean prefix. While the recent diffusion forcing strategy introduces visibility among multiple noisy blocks, its training states still differ from MultiBD inference, where decoding operates on a bounded running-set with heterogeneous slot-wise noise patterns. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-Block Diffusion Language Models (MBD-LMs), obtained by post-training BD-LMs with Multi-block Teacher Forcing (MultiTF). MultiTF integrates teacher forcing and diffusion forcing by training on bounded noise-groups conditioned on clean prefixes, with randomized noise-schedulers that better match MultiBD inference states. To make MultiBD practically executable, we further introduce an optimized decoding algorithm based on the Block Buffer mechanism that preserves prefix-cache reuse, keeps input shapes static, and translates increased decoding parallelism into wall-clock acceleration. Empirically, MBD-LLaDA2-Mini increases average Tokens Per Forward pass (TPF) from 3.47 to 6.19 and improves average accuracy from 79.95% to 81.03%; when combined with DMax, MBD-LLaDA2-Mini-DMax reaches an average TPF of 9.34 with only a 1.02% accuracy drop on math and code benchmarks.
Yijie Jin, Jiajun Xu, Yuxuan Liu +8
Jun 28, 2026cs.AI

Flow Reasoning Models: Turning Flows Into Efficient Recurrent Reasoners

Structured reasoning requires making and revising interdependent decisions to reach a globally consistent solution. Existing architectures struggle with this: autoregressive models commit sequentially and cannot revise earlier decisions, while masked diffusion models often require careful decoding schemes to coordinate interdependent predictions. We introduce Flow Reasoning Models (FRMs), a novel framework for structured reasoning that adapts continuous flows over discrete structured outputs with a simple recurrent refinement mechanism. By self-conditioning a flow model on its own past outputs, we turn one-shot denoising into iterative solution refinement. This lets FRMs make and revise decisions in parallel, efficiently coordinating interdependent choices across solutions. Yet conventional self-conditioning becomes unreliable at greater recurrent depth due to exposure bias between one-step training predictions and recursively generated inference states. We address this mismatch with Fixed-Point Forcing (FPF), which trains FRMs on states produced by their own inference dynamics while preserving the standard flow-matching objective. FRMs achieve solve rates of 99.5%99.5\%, 100.0%100.0\%, and 99.9%99.9\% on Sudoku-Extreme, Zebra, and Maze-Unique, respectively. On Sudoku-Extreme, FRMs achieve higher peak accuracy than the evaluated masked-diffusion and specialized reasoning baselines while remaining highly compute-efficient, matching the next-best method's 98.7%98.7\% peak solve rate with 44×44\times fewer inference FLOPs.
Alec Helbling, Andrey Bryutkin, Mauro Martino +3
Jun 26, 2026cs.CL

Masked Language Flow Models

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) promise fast, parallel language generation, but their reverse transition factorises across token positions -- an approximation that breaks down in the few-step sampling regime where parallel generation ought to provide the greatest efficiency gains. Flow Language Models (FLMs) sidestep this limitation by learning a continuous flow that transports noise toward clean sequences represented in Euclidean space, inducing a flow map that can be distilled for single-step generation. However, this makes complex tasks requiring multi-step reasoning problematic for FLMs, as FLMs are forced to decode every token during generation. To address this, we introduce Masked Language Flow Models (MLFMs), which incorporate masking into FLMs using a continuous stochastic interpolant to bridge partially masked and clean sequences. This design enables conditional generation via continuous flows and allows pretrained MDMs to be converted into MLFMs through a simple, lightweight adaptation. Leveraging this flexibility, we propose a novel sampler that alternates continuous denoising with the discrete unmasking of confident tokens to better support multi-step reasoning. We evaluate our approach on GSM8K and MT-Bench and find, for the first time, that flow-based language models can be scaled to solve downstream reasoning and instruction-following tasks.
Iskander Azangulov, Kianoosh Ashouritaklimi, Leo Zhang +2
Jun 16, 2026cs.CV

Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation

Recent progress has shown promise in distilling multi-step video diffusion models into efficient few-step students. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and its successor DMD2 achieved strong generation quality and fast convergence. However, due to the nature of the reverse Kullback--Leibler (KL) objective, these methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: a substantial drop in sample diversity, and visibly over-saturated outputs that deviate from real-video appearance. In this work, we propose Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), a simple post-training framework that restores diversity and fidelity in DMD with only a single-line of code change. At its core is the teacher score discrepancy to guide the student toward the real-data distribution, pulling it to missing modes (mitigating mode collapse) and away from problematic modes absent in real data (avoiding over-saturation). We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of our framework and validate our approach on text-to-video, image-to-video, and autoregressive video generation. With only 100--300 steps of finetuning, DFD effectively restores diversity and fidelity on both Wan2.1-1.3B and Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B model, resolving the over-saturation artifacts with significantly better video dynamics and appearance, and even outperforms the teacher model.
Siyi Chen, Shaowei Liu, Yixuan Jia +4
Jun 10, 2026cs.SD

AudioX-Turbo: A Unified Framework for Efficient Anything-to-Audio Generation

Audio and music generation based on flexible multimodal control signals is a widely applicable topic, with the following key challenges: 1) a unified multimodal modeling framework, 2) large-scale, high-quality training data, and 3) the prohibitive inference cost of multi-step diffusion sampling. As such, we propose AudioX-Turbo, a unified and efficient framework for anything-to-audio generation that integrates varied multimodal conditions (i.e., text, video, and audio signals) in this work. AudioX-Turbo follows a teacher-student paradigm. The teacher AudioX-Base is built on a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer with a Multimodal Adaptive Fusion module that aligns diverse multimodal inputs for high-fidelity synthesis, and is then distilled into the few-step student AudioX-Turbo via Distribution Matching Distillation adapted to flow matching, complemented by a diffusion-based discriminator for high-quality few-step generation. To support the training of AudioX-Turbo, we construct a large-scale, high-quality dataset, IF-caps-Pro, comprising approximately 9.2M samples curated through a two-stage data collection and annotation pipeline. We benchmark AudioX-Turbo across a wide range of tasks, finding that our model achieves superior performance, especially on text-to-audio and text-to-music generation, while operating at only 4 sampling steps and requiring approximately 25x fewer function evaluations (NFE) than multi-step baselines. These results demonstrate that our method is capable of audio generation under flexible multimodal control, showing efficient and powerful instruction-following capabilities. The code and datasets will be available at https://zeyuet.github.io/AudioX-Turbo/.
Zeyue Tian, Lei Ke, Zhaoyang Liu +8
Jun 9, 2026cs.CV

Mean Flow Distillation: Robust and Stable Distillation for Flow Matching Models

Flow Matching models have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of generative tasks. However, their reliance on ODE-based iterative sampling incurs substantial computational overhead in inference, which limits their applicability in real-time scenes. While distillation is a promising solution, existing approaches largely borrow from diffusion-based score matching, often failing to exploit the intrinsic geometric structure of flows and suffering from training instability, high variance, and degraded generation quality. In this paper, we propose Mean Flow Distillation (MFD), a novel distillation framework tailored for flow matching models. We theoretically demonstrate that MFD acts as a temporal low-pass filter, effectively suppressing the high-frequency optimization noise inherent in variational score distillation (VSD) while ensuring global trajectory consistency. We further prove the Mean Flow Matching Theorem, establishing that matching expected average velocities is sufficient for strict distribution alignment. Empirically, on challenging tasks of high-dimensional manifolds including 4D occupancy forecasting and text-to-image generation, MFD achieves state-of-the-art performance, enabling high-fidelity single-step generation.
An Zhao, Shengyuan Zhang, Zhongjian Sun +5
Jun 4, 2026cs.CV

Physics in 2-Steps: Locking Motion Priors Before Visual Refinement Erases Them

Image-to-Video diffusion models leverage input images to generate visually stunning content, yet frequently produce motion that violates physical laws. We reveal a surprising finding: a 2-step generation often exhibits better physical consistency than a 50-step output from the same model. Through spectral analysis, we trace this to phase erosion during denoising; the phase degrades significantly (dropping by 18%\approx 18\% from step 2 to step 50), whereas the magnitude remains relatively stable. Building on this insight, we propose PhaseLock, a training-free framework that preserves the valid motion priors from few-step inference throughout the denoising trajectory. Rather than relying on full-step inference for physical consistency, PhaseLock extracts a motion prior from just 2 steps and enforces it onto high-fidelity generation via Latent Delta Guidance. Our approach effectively mitigates phase degradation, improving physical consistency by an average of 6.2 points across diverse models while largely maintaining visual fidelity, with negligible overhead (1.06×1.06\times time, 1.02×1.02\times memory) and reduced reliance on expensive external guidance methods (5×\sim5\times time). Project Page: https://dnwjddl.github.io/phaselock
Woojung Han, Seil Kang, Youngjun Jun +3
May 30, 2026cs.LG

Generate in Reconstruction Space, Match in Semantic Space: Transport Geometry for One-Step Generation

Generative modeling and self-supervised representation learning (SSL) optimize structurally different objectives: generative training rewards distributional fidelity, while SSL rewards semantic coherence. Yet recent work repeatedly finds that SSL features improve generative training, though the mechanism of this synergy remains unclear. Here, we study the benefits of SSL in generative modeling in the framework of one-step generation where the role of representation is explicit: frozen SSL features are used to match generated samples to real data. We use the Sinkhorn divergence in that feature space, providing a tractable surrogate for the Wasserstein distance, the population-level discrepancy approximated by Fréchet-style evaluation metrics (such as FID). We find that this objective becomes highly effective when computed in a semantically structured SSL feature space (a 39×\times reduction in ImageNet FID). We trace this behavior primarily to matching estimation: semantic SSL features that suppress nuisance reconstruction details induce a more compact geometry, making distribution matching more tractable. As a consequence, the best training SSL features need not match the features used by the evaluation metric. In particular, we show that using Inception as the feature extractor can improve FID while degrading matching stability and sample quality, revealing a form of metric hacking. Using extensive experiments on ImageNet, we identify which SSL feature families lead to best generation performance and show that matching stability is a quantitative criterion for selecting them. Code is available at https://github.com/Genentech/semantic-transport-generation.
Hugues Van Assel, Edward De Brouwer, Saeed Saremi +2
May 28, 2026cs.CV

IP-Adapter Is All You Need: Towards Fine-Tuning-Free Diffusion-Based Talking Face Generation

With the rapid advancement of diffusion models, talking face generation has made remarkable progress. However, existing diffusion-based methods still require task-specific fine-tuning and large-scale audiovisual datasets, resulting in high computational costs that hinder scalability and accessibility of diffusion-based approaches across the research community. To address this, we propose a finetuning-free paradigm that directly performs talking face generation using the pretrained weights of Stable Diffusion and IP-Adapter. This backbone leverages the visual embedding capability of IP-Adapter to mine lip-related semantics from the pretrained Stable Diffusion. To address the challenges of identity drift, synchronization errors, and temporal instability, we also design three trainable-parameterfree components: (1) the Structurist, which explicitly disentangles and reassembles lip and appearance features to mitigate identity drift and appearance distortion; (2) the Structure Controller, which adaptively refines embeddings based on quasi-monotonic motion trends for precise lip synchronization; and (3) the Noise Sensor, which introduces Gaussian prior to detect and suppress flicker and jitter artifacts and enhance temporal consistency. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing SOTA approaches in both lip-sync accuracy (at least 0.16 gain in PCLD) and visual fidelity (at least 0.7 improvement in FID), establishing a novel fine-tuning-free diffusion framework for talking face generation.
Hao Wu, Xiangyang Luo, Hao Wang +3
May 27, 2026cs.SD

Dasheng AudioGen: A Unified Model for Generating Coherent Audio Scenes from Text

Audio generation has long been fragmented, with speech, music, and sound effects produced by domain-specific models that fail to jointly generate coherent audio scenes from a single description. The key obstacles are insufficient fine-grained supervision for real-world mixed audio and limited acoustic representations for modeling concurrent audio components. We present Dasheng AudioGen, a unified framework for generating general mixed-audio scenes from text. Dasheng AudioGen introduces structured multi-view captions, which explicitly decouple complex acoustic scenes into complementary description views, thereby enabling fine-grained control over audio layers. Furthermore, we employ a high-dimensional unified semantic-acoustic representation as the shared latent space. It injects semantic priors that facilitate cross-modal training convergence, while its high-dimensional feature space provides sufficient capacity to disentangle and fuse concurrent audio components effectively. With these designs, a simple flow-matching DiT achieves high-quality end-to-end audio scene generation. We also establish a comprehensive evaluation pipeline for audio scene generation. Experiments demonstrate that Dasheng AudioGen achieves performance approaching real-world recordings in mixed-audio categories, while remaining competitive with specialized models in single-type generation tasks. Demos are available at https://nieeim.github.io/Dasheng-AudioGen-Web/.
Jiahao Mei, Heinrich Dinkel, Yadong Niu +7
May 25, 2026cs.CV

CollectionLoRA: Collecting 50 Effects in 1 LoRA via Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation

Customized image editing aims to equip pre-trained diffusion models with specific visual effects using limited paired data, typically via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). As the number of desired effects grows, storing and dynamically loading numerous these effect LoRAs significantly increases deployment overhead. Furthermore, current pipelines typically cascade these effect LoRAs with acceleration modules for fast generation, which triggers severe parameter interference and results in concept bleeding and style degradation. We propose CollectionLoRA, a multi-teacher on-policy distillation framework capable of distilling the concepts of up to 50 different effect LoRAs along with few-step generation capabilities into a single LoRA. This fundamentally resolves the feature interference issue and significantly reduces deployment costs. Specifically, the method introduces (i) a Probabilistic Dual-Stream Routing mechanism that enables the model to randomly switch between data sources during training, effectively enhancing its generalization in unseen scenarios; (ii) an Asymmetric Orthogonal Prompting strategy to achieve concept isolation within the prompt space; (iii) a Coarse-to-Fine Distillation Objective to mitigate the distribution gap between the teacher and student models. Extensive evaluations show that CollectionLoRA distills all customized effects and few-step generation into a single LoRA, reducing deployment overhead while achieving concept fidelity comparable to or better than independently trained teacher models. Code: https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/CollectionLoRA
Fangtai Wu, Hailong Guo, Shijie Huang +7
May 23, 2026cs.LG

Bilevel Optimization of Synthetic Trajectories for Multi-Turn LLM Fine-Tuning

While LLMs excel at single-turn generation, they struggle with long-horizon, multi-turn interactions. Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a scalable approach, yet its performance hinges on the availability and quality of multi-turn trajectory data. A common remedy is to augment training with synthetic trajectories generated by LLMs or simulators, but synthetic data is highly heterogeneous in quality, and naively treating all trajectories as equally informative can degrade performance. We propose BOOST, a bilevel optimization framework where the inner level trains the LLM on reweighted data and the outer level trains a lightweight reweighting head on held-out real validation tasks, assigning continuous trajectory-level weights without requiring an external judge. To ground this approach, we derive a PAC-Bayesian bound revealing a three-way trade-off: synthetic data increases diversity but risks task-shift, while concentrating weight on high-quality trajectories improves empirical performance at the cost of effective sample size. Empirically, our method consistently outperforms multiple baselines. Analysis reveals it upweights synthetic trajectories that align with the real data distribution and exhibit higher qualitative merit.
Shresth Verma, Mauricio Tec, Cheol Woo Kim +2
May 22, 2026cs.AI

HyperGuide: Hyperbolic Guidance for Efficient Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Language Models

Multi-step reasoning remains a central challenge for large language models: single-pass generation is efficient but lacks accuracy; tree-search methods explore multiple paths but are computation-heavy. We address this gap by distilling reasoning progress into a hyperbolic geometric signal that guides step-by-step generation. Our approach is motivated by a structural observation: in combinatorial reasoning trees, solution-bearing states are few while dead ends are exponentially numerous. The hyperbolic space matches this asymmetry, with compact volume near the origin and exponentially expanding capacity toward the boundary, so that distance-to-origin naturally encodes solution proximity while angular separation distinguishes branches requiring different next operations. We train a lightweight head to project LLM hidden states into this space, then fine-tune a low-rank adapter interactively on its own reasoning attempts to act on the injected signal. Across multiple benchmarks, the geometric signal yields consistent gains, with larger improvements on deeper reasoning chains. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/yuyuliu11037/HyperGuide.
Yuyu Liu, Haotian Xu, Yanan He +3
May 22, 2026cs.CV

One-Forcing: Towards Stable One-Step Autoregressive Video Generation

Recent advances have substantially improved real-time interactive video generation in the autoregressive regime. However, most existing few-step autoregressive video generation methods, often distilled from a corresponding many-step teacher, default to a 4-step sampling configuration, which still incurs considerable latency during deployment and suffers from severe quality degradation when the number of sampling steps is further reduced, particularly in the one-step setting. Trajectory-style consistency distillation methods often produce videos with weak dynamics, while DMD-based approaches, such as Self-Forcing, tend to yield blurry frames. To address this challenge, we propose One-Forcing, a simple yet effective approach which augments the DMD objective with an auxiliary GAN loss for high-quality and efficient one-step video generation. Experiments on VBench show that One-Forcing achieves a total score of 83.76, establishing state-of-the-art performance among one-step causal video generation methods and remaining competitive with strong many-step approaches. We further demonstrate that one-step framewise autoregressive generation can be achieved stably with merely one-third of the training cost of the chunkwise model, a setting that prior methods have failed to achieve successfully.
Jiaqi Feng, Justin Cui, Yuanhao Ban +1
May 20, 2026cs.CV

Decomposing Subject-Driven Image Generation via Intermediate Structural Prediction

Subject-driven text-to-image generation still struggles to preserve high-frequency identity details such as logos, patterns, and text. Existing methods typically operate directly in RGB space, which often leads to detail degradation under substantial edits. We propose a two-stage framework that decouples structure from appearance by first predicting a Canny map and then rendering the final image conditioned on both the source appearance and the predicted structure. To improve text handling, we further introduce a fully automatic pipeline that constructs a 100k-pair text-aware dataset with cross-view textual consistency. Experiments, including GPT-4.1-based evaluation and a knowledge distillation study, show clear gains over selected baselines and suggest that intermediate structural prediction is an effective route for high-fidelity subject-driven generation. Our dataset and code will be made publicly available.
Hanzhong Guo, Yizhou Yu
May 15, 2026cs.CV

AtlasVid: Efficient Ultra-High-Resolution Long Video Generation via Decoupled Global-Local Modeling

Recent diffusion-based video generators have achieved remarkable visual fidelity and prompt controllability, yet scaling them to ultra-high-resolution (UHR) long videos remains prohibitively expensive. The difficulty is especially pronounced for long single-shot generation where a continuous scene must preserve global temporal coherence, and fine-grained spatial details without relying on clip transitions or autoregressive shot stitching. In this work, we revisit this challenge from the perspective of decoupled modeling. We argue that existing video diffusion models already encode strong local visual priors, while the main bottleneck lies in efficiently extending global spatiotemporal modeling as resolution and duration increase. Based on this insight, we propose AtlaVid, a decoupled global-local framework for efficient UHR long video generation. AtlaVid first generates a low-resolution and low-FPS global semantic proxy via temporally scaled RoPE, thereby extending the temporal horizon without increasing the training token count. Guided by this proxy, a high-resolution detail branch performs joint denoising with hierarchical locality-preserving attention. Reordered spatiotemporal windows preserve geometric locality and asymmetric global-local attention injects aligned semantic guidance and preserves the model's pretrained ability. This design enables resolution-agnostic training: the model is trained only at 720P with lightweight LoRA adaptation, yet generalizes directly to 4K and beyond for longer (>10s) video synthesis. Experiments show that AtlaVid substantially improves the efficiency of ultra-high-resolution long video generation, achieving high-quality UHR long video generation with 60.9x speed up and significantly less training cost and even better performance than native 4K video generators.
Ziyang Mai, Yuyao Zhang, Yu-Wing Tai
May 14, 2026cs.CV

Unlocking Complex Visual Generation via Closed-Loop Verified Reasoning

Despite rapid advancements, current text-to-image (T2I) models predominantly rely on a single-step generation paradigm, which struggles with complex semantics and faces diminishing returns from parameter scaling. While recent multi-step reasoning approaches show promise, they are hindered by ungrounded planning hallucinations lacking verification, monolithic post-hoc reflection, long-context optimization instabilities, and prohibitive inference latency. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose the Closed-Loop Visual Reasoning (CLVR) framework, a comprehensive system that deeply couples visual-language logical planning with pixel-level diffusion generation. CLVR introduces an automated data engine with step-level visual verification to synthesize reliable reasoning trajectories, and proposes Proxy Prompt Reinforcement Learning (PPRL) to resolve long-context optimization instabilities by distilling interleaved multimodal histories into explicit reward signals for accurate causal attribution. Furthermore, to mitigate the severe latency bottleneck caused by iterative denoising, we propose ΔΔ-Space Weight Merge (DSWM), a theoretically grounded method that fuses alignment weights with off-the-shelf distillation priors, reducing the per-step inference cost to just 4 NFEs without requiring expensive re-distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLVR outperforms existing open-source baselines across multiple benchmarks and approaches the performance of proprietary commercial models, unlocking general test-time scaling capabilities for complex visual generation.
Hanbo Cheng, Limin Lin, Ruo Zhang +2
May 13, 2026cs.CV

AnyFlow: Any-Step Video Diffusion Model with On-Policy Flow Map Distillation

Few-step video generation has been significantly advanced by consistency distillation. However, the performance of consistency-distilled models often degrades as more sampling steps are allocated at test time, limiting their effectiveness for any-step video diffusion. This limitation arises because consistency distillation replaces the original probability-flow ODE trajectory with a consistency-sampling trajectory, weakening the desirable test-time scaling behavior of ODE sampling. To address this limitation, we introduce AnyFlow, the first any-step video diffusion distillation framework based on flow maps. Instead of distilling a model for only a few fixed sampling steps, AnyFlow optimizes the full ODE sampling trajectory. To this end, we shift the distillation target from endpoint consistency mapping (ztz0)(z_{t}\rightarrow z_{0}) to flow-map transition learning (ztzr)(z_{t}\rightarrow z_{r}) over arbitrary time intervals. We further propose Flow Map Backward Simulation, which decomposes a full Euler rollout into shortcut flow-map transitions, enabling efficient on-policy distillation that reduces test-time errors (i.e., discretization error in few-step sampling and exposure bias in causal generation). Extensive experiments across both bidirectional and causal architectures, at scales ranging from 1.3B to 14B parameters, demonstrate that AnyFlow achieves performance matches or surpasses consistency-based counterparts in the few-step regime, while scaling with sampling step budgets.
Yuchao Gu, Guian Fang, Yuxin Jiang +4
May 13, 2026cs.CV

DirectTryOn: One-Step Virtual Try-On via Straightened Conditional Transport

Recent diffusion- and flow-based VTON methods achieve strong results with pretrained generative models, but their reliance on multi-step sampling incurs high inference cost, while existing acceleration methods largely overlook the intrinsic structure of the try-on task. In this paper, we highlight a key observation: VTON outputs are highly constrained by the conditional inputs, suggesting that the conditional sampling trajectory can be much straighter than that in general image generation, making one-step generation a natural solution. However, limited task-specific data makes training from scratch impractical, forcing existing methods to fine-tune pretrained models whose objectives do not encourage such straight conditional trajectories. Thus, the deviation from an ideal straight path mainly comes from the mismatch between pretrained base models and the conditional nature of try-on generation, rather than from the task itself. Motivated by this insight, we encourage straighter VTON sampling trajectories through three targeted modifications: pure conditional transport, a garment preservation loss, and a self consistency loss. We further introduce a one-step distillation stage. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with one-step sampling, establishing a new standard for efficient and high-quality VTON.
Xianbing Sun, Jiahui Zhan, Liqing Zhang +1
May 12, 2026cs.LG

Discrete MeanFlow: One-Step Generation via Conditional Transition Kernels

MeanFlow enables one-step generation in continuous spaces by learning an average velocity over a time interval rather than the instantaneous velocity field of flow matching. However, discrete state spaces do not have smooth trajectories or spatial derivatives, so the continuous formulation does not directly apply. We introduce Discrete MeanFlow, which replaces the motion of a point with the transport of probability mass over finite states. Our key object is the conditional transition kernel of a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC), from which we define a mean discrete rate that measures the average change in transition probability over a time interval. We prove a Discrete MeanFlow identity that relates this finite-interval rate to the instantaneous CTMC generator at the endpoint, with the Kolmogorov forward equation replacing the spatial chain rule of continuous MeanFlow. Based on this identity, we parameterize the transition kernel directly using a boundary-by-construction design that guarantees valid probability outputs and exact boundary conditions without auxiliary losses. Since the learned kernel is itself a probability distribution, generation reduces to a single forward pass followed by one categorical draw meaning no iterative denoising, ODE integration, or multi-step refinement is required. We validate the framework on exact finite-state Markov chains, where the learned kernel recovers the analytical ground truth to high precision, and on factorized synthetic sequence generation tasks with varying alphabet sizes and sequence lengths.
Fairoz Nower Khan, Nabuat Zaman Nahim, Md Sajid Ahmed +2
May 12, 2026cs.CV

STRIDE: Training-Free Diversity Guidance via PCA-Directed Feature Perturbation in Single-Step Diffusion Models

Distilled one-step (T=1) or few-step (T\leq4) diffusion models enable real-time image generation but often exhibit reduced sample diversity compared to their multi-step counterparts. In multi-step diffusion, diversity can be introduced through schedules, trajectories, or iterative optimization; however, these mechanisms are unavailable in the few-step or single-step setting, limiting the effectiveness of existing diversity-enhancing methods. A natural alternative is to perturb intermediate features, but naive feature perturbation is often ineffective, either yielding limited diversity gains or degrading generation quality. We argue that effective diversity injection in few-step models requires perturbations that respect the model's learned feature geometry. Based on this insight, we propose STRIDE, a training-free and optimization-free method that operates in a single forward pass. STRIDE injects spatially coherent (pink) noise into intermediate transformer features, projected onto the principal components of the model's own activations, ensuring that perturbations lie on the learned feature manifold. This design enables controlled variation along meaningful directions in the representation space. Extensive experiments on FLUX.1-schnell and SD3.5 Turbo across COCO, DrawBench, PartiPrompts, and GenEval show that STRIDE consistently improves diversity while maintaining strong text alignment. In particular, STRIDE reduces intra-batch similarity with minimal impact on CLIP score, and Pareto-dominates existing training-free baselines on the diversity-fidelity frontier. These results highlight that, in the absence of iterative refinement, improving diversity in few-step and one-step diffusion depends not on increasing perturbation strength, but on aligning perturbations with the model's internal representation structure.
Ankit Yadav, Arpit Garg, Ta Duc Huy +1
May 11, 2026cs.CL

Infinite Mask Diffusion for Few-Step Distillation

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models in language modeling, offering the advantages of parallel decoding and bidirectional context processing within a simple yet effective framework. Specifically, their explicit distinction between masked tokens and data underlies their simple framework and effective conditional generation. However, MDMs typically require many sampling iterations due to factorization errors stemming from simultaneous token updates. We observe that a theoretical lower bound of the factorization error exists, which standard MDMs cannot reduce due to their use of a deterministic single-state mask. In this paper, we propose the Infinite Mask Diffusion Model (IMDM), which introduces a stochastic infinite-state mask to mitigate the theoretical bound while directly inheriting the benefits of MDMs, including the compatibility with pre-trained weights. We empirically demonstrate that MDM fails to perform few-step generation even in a simple synthetic task due to the factorization error bound, whereas IMDM can find an efficient solution for the same task. Finally, when equipped with appropriate distillation methods, IMDM surpasses existing few-step distillation methods at small step counts on LM1B and OpenWebText. Code is available at https://Ugness.github.io/official_imdm.
Jaehoon Yoo, Wonjung Kim, Chanhyuk Lee +1
May 9, 2026cs.CV

ECTraj: Enhanced Consistency Training for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction

Diffusion models for multi-agent trajectory prediction are limited by iterative denoising, which causes inference latency that hinders their use in time-critical settings like autonomous driving. Fast-sampling variants using DDIM and informed initial noise distributions partially alleviate this issue, but they either fail to achieve true single-step generation or are constrained by the chosen noise distribution. Consistency Models (CMs) offer high-quality one-step generation by mapping noise directly to data, but are difficult to train from scratch. We propose ECTraj, an enhanced CM pipeline with improved training and conditional generation for trajectory prediction. Our framework extends the student-teacher consistency training scheme: the student produces standard outputs, while the teacher explicitly fuses its predictions with parts of the ground truth to give stronger supervision. We also exploit CMs' direct denoising for top-K multi-shot generation during training. Combining conditional generation with this enhanced consistency objective yields faster inference and improved prediction accuracy, establishing competitive new benchmarks on the large-scale Argoverse 2 dataset.
Alen Mrdovic, Qingze, Liu +6
May 8, 2026cs.LG

Trajectory as the Teacher: Few-Step Discrete Flow Matching via Energy-Navigated Distillation

Discrete flow matching generates text by iteratively transforming noise tokens into coherent language, but may require hundreds of forward passes. Distillation uses the multi-step trajectory to train a student to reproduce the process in a few steps. When the student underperforms, the usual explanation is insufficient capacity. We argue the opposite: the trajectory is the bottleneck, not the student. Each training trajectory is built through a chain of blind stochastic jumps with no evaluation of sequence quality; a single bad decision at an early midpoint propagates through subsequent steps, yet the student must imitate the result. Trajectory-Shaped Discrete Flow Matching (TS-DFM) replaces these blind jumps with guided navigation: a lightweight energy compass evaluates candidate continuations at each midpoint, selecting the most coherent. All shaping is training-only; inference cost is unchanged. On 170M-parameter language modeling, the shaped student at 8 steps achieves 32% lower perplexity than the 1,024-step teacher while being 128x faster, with gains consistent across source distributions and three evaluators of increasing scale. TS-DFM achieves the best perplexity of any discrete-generation baseline we compare against, including methods trained on 6x more data or using 5x larger models.
Amin Karimi Monsefi, Dominic Culver, Nikhil Bhendawade +3
May 7, 2026cs.CV

Not All Tokens Need 40 Steps: Heterogeneous Step Allocation in Diffusion Transformers for Efficient Video Generation

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved state-of-the-art video generation quality, but they incur immense computational cost because standard inference applies the same number of denoising steps uniformly to every token in the sequence. It is well known that human vision ignores vast amounts of redundant motion. Why, then, do our densest models treat every spatiotemporal token with equal priority? In this paper, we introduce Heterogeneous Step Allocation (HSA), a training-free inference algorithm that assigns varying step budgets to different spatiotemporal tokens based on their velocity dynamics. To resolve the resulting sequence-length mismatch without sacrificing global context, HSA introduces a KV-cache synchronization mechanism that allows active tokens to attend to the full sequence while entirely bypassing inactive tokens. Furthermore, we derive a cached Euler update that advances the latent states of skipped tokens in a single operation without additional model evaluations. We evaluate HSA on the Wan-2 and LTX-2 models for both text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) generation. Our results demonstrate that HSA significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art caching methods and the vanilla Flow Matching baseline, especially at aggressive acceleration regimes (e.g., 50% and 25% runtimes). Crucially, HSA achieves a superior quality-runtime Pareto frontier without the need for expensive offline profiling, robustly preserving structural integrity and generation quality even under tight computational budgets. Project page: https://ernestchu.github.io/hsa
Ernie Chu, Vishal M. Patel
May 6, 2026cs.CV

Stream-T1: Test-Time Scaling for Streaming Video Generation

While Test-Time Scaling (TTS) offers a promising direction to enhance video generation without the surging costs of training, current test-time video generation methods based on diffusion models suffer from exorbitant candidate exploration costs and lack temporal guidance. To address these structural bottlenecks, we propose shifting the focus to streaming video generation. We identify that its chunk-level synthesis and few denoising steps are intrinsically suited for TTS, significantly lowering computational overhead while enabling fine-grained temporal control. Driven by this insight, we introduced Stream-T1, a pioneering comprehensive TTS framework exclusively tailored for streaming video generation. Specifically, Stream-T1 is composed of three units: (1) Stream -Scaled Noise Propagation, which actively refines the initial latent noise of the generating chunk using historically proven, high-quality previous chunk noise, effectively establishes temporal dependency and utilizing the historical Gaussian prior to guide the current generation; (2) Stream -Scaled Reward Pruning, which comprehensively evaluates generated candidates to strike an optimal balance between local spatial aesthetics and global temporal coherence by integrating immediate short-term assessments with sliding-window-based long-term evaluations; (3) Stream-Scaled Memory Sinking, which dynamically routes the context evicted from KV-cache into distinct updating pathways guided by the reward feedback, ensuring that previously generated visual information effectively anchors and guides the subsequent video stream. Evaluated on both 5s and 30s comprehensive video benchmarks, Stream-T1 demonstrates profound superiority, significantly improving temporal consistency, motion smoothness, and frame-level visual quality.
Yijing Tu, Shaojin Wu, Mengqi Huang +4
Apr 29, 2026cs.CV

AdvDMD: Adversarial Reward Meets DMD For High-Quality Few-Step Generation

Diffusion models offer superior generation quality at the expense of extensive sampling steps. Distillation methods, with Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) as a popular example, can mitigate this issue, but performance degradation remains pronounced when sampling steps are limited. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been leveraged to improve the few-step generation quality during distillation, with the potential to even surpass the performance of the teacher model. However, existing approaches are combinatorial in nature, merely integrating an RL process with the distillation process, which introduces unnecessary complexities. To address this gap, we propose AdvDMD, a method that seamlessly unifies DMD distillation and RL. Specifically, AdvDMD employs the adversarially trained discriminator from DMD2 as the reward model, which assigns low scores to generated images and high scores to real ones. It is trained on both intermediate and final states of the denoising process and updated online with the distilled model, enabling a holistic supervision of the sampling trajectories and mitigating reward hacking. We adopt a unified SDE backward simulation and a different training schedule for DMD and RL to enable a more stable and efficient training. Experimental results demonstrate that the 4-step AdvDMD outperforms the original 40-step model for SD3.5 on DPG-Bench, while achieving significant performance gains for SD3 on the GenEval. On Qwen-Image, our 2-step AdvDMD achieves superior performance over TwinFlow.
Xu Wang, Zexian Li, Litong Gong +2
Apr 28, 2026cs.CV

Mutual Forcing: Dual-Mode Self-Evolution for Fast Autoregressive Audio-Video Character Generation

In this work, we propose Mutual Forcing, a framework for fast autoregressive audio-video generation with long-horizon audio-video synchronization. Our approach addresses two key challenges: joint audio-video modeling and fast autoregressive generation. To ease joint audio-video optimization, we adopt a two-stage training strategy: we first train uni-modal generators and then couple them into a unified audio-video model for joint training on paired data. For streaming generation, we ask whether a native fast causal audio-video model can be trained directly, instead of following existing streaming distillation pipelines that typically train a bidirectional model first and then convert it into a causal generator through multiple distillation stages. Our answer is Mutual Forcing, which builds directly on native autoregressive model and integrates few-step and multi-step generation within a single weight-shared model, enabling self-distillation and improved training-inference consistency. The multi-step mode improves the few-step mode via self-distillation, while the few-step mode generates historical context during training to improve training-inference consistency; because the two modes share parameters, these two effects reinforce each other within a single model. Compared with prior approaches such as Self-Forcing, Mutual Forcing removes the need for an additional bidirectional teacher model, supports more flexible training sequence lengths, reduces training overhead, and allows the model to improve directly from real paired data rather than a fixed teacher. Experiments show that Mutual Forcing matches or surpasses strong baselines that require around 50 sampling steps while using only 4 to 8 steps, demonstrating substantial advantages in both efficiency and quality. The project page is available at https://mutualforcing.github.io.
Yupeng Zhou, Lianghua Huang, Zhifan Wu +7
Apr 26, 2026cs.CV

MuSS: A Large-Scale Dataset and Cinematic Narrative Benchmark for Multi-Shot Subject-to-Video Generation

While video foundation models excel at single-shot generation, real-world cinematic storytelling inherently relies on complex multi-shot sequencing. Further progress is constrained by the absence of datasets that address three core challenges: authentic narrative logic, spatiotemporal text-video alignment conflicts, and the "copy-paste" dilemma prevalent in Subject-to-Video (S2V) generation. To bridge this gap, we introduce MuSS, a large-scale, dual-track dataset tailored for multi-shot video and S2V generation. Sourced from over 3,000 movies, MuSS explicitly supports both complex montage transitions and subject-centric narratives. To construct this dataset, we pioneer a progressive captioning pipeline that eliminates contextual conflicts by ensuring local shot-level accuracy before enforcing global narrative coherence. Crucially, we implement a cross-shot matching mechanism to fundamentally eradicate the S2V copy-paste shortcut. Alongside the dataset, we propose the Cinematic Narrative Benchmark, featuring a visual-logic-driven paradigm and a novel Anti-Copy-Paste Variance (ACP-Var) metric to rigorously assess continuous storytelling and 3D structural consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while current baselines struggle with continuous narrative logic or degenerate into trivial 2D sticker generators, our MuSS-augmented model achieves state-of-the-art narrative effectiveness and cross-shot identity preservation.
Haojie Zhang, Di Wu, Bingyan Liu +5
Apr 24, 2026cs.CV

Efficient Diffusion Distillation via Embedding Loss

Recent advances in distilling expensive diffusion models into efficient few-step generators show significant promise. However, these methods typically demand substantial computational resources and extended training periods, limiting accessibility for resource-constrained researchers, and existing supplementary loss functions have notable limitations. Regression loss requires pre-generating large datasets before training and limits the student model to the teacher's performance, while GAN-based losses suffer from training instability and require careful tuning. In this paper, we propose Embedding Loss (EL), a novel supplementary loss function that complements existing diffusion distillation methods to enhance generation quality and accelerate training with smaller batch sizes. Leveraging feature embeddings from a diverse set of randomly initialized networks, EL effectively aligns the feature distributions between the distilled few-step generator and the original data. By computing Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) in the embedded feature space, EL ensures robust distribution matching, thereby preserving sample fidelity and diversity during distillation. Within distribution matching distillation frameworks, EL demonstrates strong empirical performance for one-step generators. On the CIFAR-10 dataset, our approach achieves state-of-the-art FID values of 1.475 for unconditional generation and 1.380 for conditional generation. Beyond CIFAR-10, we further validate EL across multiple benchmarks and distillation methods, including ImageNet, AFHQ-v2, and FFHQ datasets, using DMD, DI, and CM distillation frameworks, demonstrating consistent improvements over existing one-step distillation methods. Our method also reduces training iterations by up to 80%, offering a more practical and scalable solution for deploying diffusion-based generative models in resource-constrained environments.
Jincheng Ying, Yitao Chen, Li Wenlin +2
Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

SketchVLM: Vision language models can annotate images to explain thoughts and guide users

When answering questions about images, humans naturally point, label, and draw to explain their reasoning. In contrast, modern vision-language models (VLMs) such as Gemini-3-Pro and GPT-5 only respond with text, which can be difficult for users to verify. We present SketchVLM, a training-free, model-agnostic framework that enables VLMs to produce non-destructive, editable SVG overlays on the input image to visually explain their answers. Across seven benchmarks spanning visual reasoning (maze navigation, ball-drop trajectory prediction, and object counting) and drawing (part labeling, connecting-the-dots, and drawing shapes around objects), SketchVLM improves visual reasoning task accuracy by up to +28.5 percentage points and annotation quality by up to 1.48x relative to image-editing and fine-tuned sketching baselines, while also producing annotations that are more faithful to the model's stated answer. We find that single-turn generation already achieves strong accuracy and annotation quality, and multi-turn generation opens up further opportunities for human-AI collaboration. An interactive demo and code are at https://sketchvlm.github.io/.
Brandon Collins, Logan Bolton, Hung Huy Nguyen +3
Apr 22, 2026cs.GR

Seed3D 2.0: Advancing High-Fidelity Simulation-Ready 3D Content Generation

We present Seed3D 2.0, an advanced 3D content generation system built on Seed3D 1.0, with substantial improvements across generation fidelity, simulation-ready capabilities, and application coverage. For geometry, a coarse-to-fine two-stage pipeline decouples global structure learning from high-frequency detail recovery, while a locality-aware VAE achieves higher spatial compression and more efficient decoding. For texture and material generation, we replace the cascaded pipeline of Seed3D 1.0 with a unified PBR model that directly generates multi-view albedo and metallic-roughness maps, enhanced by Mixture-of-Experts scaling and VLM-based semantic conditioning for improved material precision and visual fidelity. Beyond single-object generation, Seed3D 2.0 introduces a simulation-ready model suite comprising scene layout planning, part-aware decomposition, and training-free articulation generation, enabling coherent scene construction and part-level physical interaction across physics and graphics engines. A large-scale human preference study against five recent commercial models shows that Seed3D 2.0 achieves consistent win rates of 69.0% to 89.9% in textured 3D asset generation. Seed3D 2.0 is available on https://exp.volcengine.com/ark/vision?_vtm_=0.0.c70961.d701978.0&mode=vision&modelId=doubao-seed3d-2-0-260328&tab=Gen3D
Diandian Gu, Jing Lin, Gaohong Liu +25
Apr 21, 2026cs.LG

Guiding Distribution Matching Distillation with Gradient-Based Reinforcement Learning

Diffusion distillation, exemplified by Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), has shown great promise in few-step generation but often sacrifices quality for sampling speed. While integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL) into distillation offers potential, a naive fusion of these two objectives relies on suboptimal raw sample evaluation. This sample-based scoring creates inherent conflicts with the distillation trajectory and produces unreliable rewards due to the noisy nature of early-stage generation. To overcome these limitations, we propose GDMD, a novel framework that redefines the reward mechanism by prioritizing distillation gradients over raw pixel outputs as the primary signal for optimization. By reinterpreting the DMD gradients as implicit target tensors, our framework enables existing reward models to directly evaluate the quality of distillation updates. This gradient-level guidance functions as an adaptive weighting that synchronizes the RL policy with the distillation objective, effectively neutralizing optimization divergence. Empirical results show that GDMD sets a new SOTA for few-step generation. Specifically, our 4-step models outperform the quality of their multi-step teacher and substantially exceed previous DMDR results in GenEval and human-preference metrics, exhibiting strong scalability potential.
Linwei Dong, Ruoyu Guo, Ge Bai +3
Apr 20, 2026cs.CV

Extending One-Step Image Generation from Class Labels to Text via Discriminative Text Representation

Few-step generation has been a long-standing goal, with recent one-step generation methods exemplified by MeanFlow achieving remarkable results. Existing research on MeanFlow primarily focuses on class-to-image generation. However, an intuitive yet unexplored direction is to extend the condition from fixed class labels to flexible text inputs, enabling richer content creation. Compared to the limited class labels, text conditions pose greater challenges to the model's understanding capability, necessitating the effective integration of powerful text encoders into the MeanFlow framework. Surprisingly, although incorporating text conditions appears straightforward, we find that integrating powerful LLM-based text encoders using conventional training strategies results in unsatisfactory performance. To uncover the underlying cause, we conduct detailed analyses and reveal that, due to the extremely limited number of refinement steps in the MeanFlow generation, such as only one step, the text feature representations are required to possess sufficiently high discriminability. This also explains why discrete and easily distinguishable class features perform well within the MeanFlow framework. Guided by these insights, we leverage a powerful LLM-based text encoder validated to possess the required semantic properties and adapt the MeanFlow generation process to this framework, resulting in efficient text-conditioned synthesis for the first time. Furthermore, we validate our approach on the widely used diffusion model, demonstrating significant generation performance improvements. We hope this work provides a general and practical reference for future research on text-conditioned MeanFlow generation. The code is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/EMF.
Chenxi Zhao, Chen Zhu, Xiaokun Feng +6
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

Reward-Aware Trajectory Shaping for Few-step Visual Generation

Achieving high-fidelity generation in extremely few sampling steps has long been a central goal of generative modeling. Existing approaches largely rely on distillation-based frameworks to compress the original multi-step denoising process into a few-step generator. However, such methods inherently constrain the student to imitate a stronger multi-step teacher, imposing the teacher as an upper bound on student performance. We argue that introducing \textbf{preference alignment awareness} enables the student to optimize toward reward-preferred generation quality, potentially surpassing the teacher instead of being restricted to rigid teacher imitation. To this end, we propose \textbf{Reward-Aware Trajectory Shaping (RATS)}, a lightweight framework for preference-aligned few-step generation. Specifically, teacher and student latent trajectories are aligned at key denoising stages through horizon matching, while a \textbf{reward-aware gate} is introduced to adaptively regulate teacher guidance based on their relative reward performance. Trajectory shaping is strengthened when the teacher achieves higher rewards, and relaxed when the student matches or surpasses the teacher, thereby enabling continued reward-driven improvement. By seamlessly integrating trajectory distillation, reward-aware gating, and preference alignment, RATS effectively transfers preference-relevant knowledge from high-step generators without incurring additional test-time computational overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that RATS substantially improves the efficiency--quality trade-off in few-step visual generation, significantly narrowing the gap between few-step students and stronger multi-step generators.
Rui Li, Bingyu Li, Yuanzhi Liang +3
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

TurboTalk: Progressive Distillation for One-Step Audio-Driven Talking Avatar Generation

Existing audio-driven video digital human generation models rely on multi-step denoising, resulting in substantial computational overhead that severely limits their deployment in real-world settings. While one-step distillation approaches can significantly accelerate inference, they often suffer from training instability. To address this challenge, we propose TurboTalk, a two-stage progressive distillation framework that effectively compresses a multi-step audio-driven video diffusion model into a single-step generator. We first adopt Distribution Matching Distillation to obtain a strong and stable 4-step student, and then progressively reduce the denoising steps from 4 to 1 through adversarial distillation. To ensure stable training under extreme step reduction, we introduce a progressive timestep sampling strategy and a self-compare adversarial objective that provides an intermediate adversarial reference that stabilizes progressive distillation. Our method achieve single-step generation of video talking avatar, boosting inference speed by 120 times while maintaining high generation quality.
Xiangyu Liu, Feng Gao, Xiaomei Zhang +4
Feb 12, 2026cs.CL

Few-Step Diffusion Language Models via Trajectory Self-Distillation

Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have emerged as powerful generative models with the promise of fast text generation through parallel decoding. However, realizing this potential in practice remains challenging: reducing the number of decoding steps, typically causes a substantial degradation in output quality due to token factorization error. To alleviate this, we propose a self-distillation framework that trains a few-step student to match the generative trajectory of a full-step teacher. We theoretically and empirically show that trajectory-level supervision mitigates this factorization error, thereby enabling effective few-step decoding. We further incorporate Direct Discriminative Optimization (DDO), a reverse-KL objective that encourages mode-seeking toward the teacher's modes, yielding stronger performance on challenging reasoning tasks. Across reasoning and code-generation benchmarks, our method substantially narrows the gap between few-step and full-step decoding. The source code is available at https://github.com/Tyrion58/T3D.
Tunyu Zhang, Xinxi Zhang, Ligong Han +10
Oct 16, 2025cs.AI

Compositional Machine Design as Program Synthesis with LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong abilities in writing and revising programs, yet many program-synthesis benchmarks still evaluate programs in symbolic or digital environments. We introduce compositional machine design, a physically grounded form of program synthesis where machines are written as programs that compose standardized parts, and success is determined by simulated physical behavior. To study this problem, we present BesiegeField, a testbed built on the machine-building game Besiege. In BesiegeField, LLM agents generate machine programs from textual functional demands, execute the resulting machines in simulation, and receive rewards and state feedback. We benchmark LLM agents across representative machine-design tasks under single-agent generation, iterative editing, and hierarchical workflows. Strong models recover task-relevant structures and sometimes achieve nontrivial physical performance, but often struggle with spatially precise assembly, mechanism-level planning, and translating feedback into useful structural edits. We further finetune Qwen2.5-14B, an open-source LLM, with reinforcement learning from simulation-derived rewards. We find that, under a fixed generation budget, RL improves the best machine discovered. We additionally evaluate human performance to provide a reference point for task difficulty. These results establish compositional machine design as a testbed for studying LLM agents that synthesize executable machine programs and improve them through physical feedback.
Wenqian Zhang, Yangyi Huang, Weiyang Liu +1
May 28, 2025cs.LG

Physics-Informed Distillation of Diffusion Models for PDE-Constrained Generation

Modeling physical systems in a generative manner offers several advantages, including the ability to handle partial observations, generate diverse solutions, and address both forward and inverse problems. Recently, diffusion models have gained increasing attention in the modeling of physical systems, particularly those governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). However, diffusion models only access noisy data xt\boldsymbol{x}_t at intermediate steps, making it infeasible to directly enforce constraints on the clean sample x0\boldsymbol{x}_0 at each noisy level. As a workaround, constraints are typically applied to the expectation of clean samples E[x0xt]\mathbb{E}[\boldsymbol{x}_0|\boldsymbol{x}_t], which is estimated using the learned score network. However, imposing PDE constraints on the expectation does not strictly represent the one on the true clean data, known as Jensen's Gap. This gap creates a trade-off: enforcing PDE constraints may come at the cost of reduced accuracy in generative modeling. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective post-hoc distillation approach, where PDE constraints are not injected directly into the diffusion process, but instead enforced during a post-hoc distillation stage. We term our method as Physics-Informed Distillation of Diffusion Models (PIDDM). This distillation not only facilitates single-step generation with improved PDE satisfaction, but also support both forward and inverse problem solving and reconstruction from randomly partial observation. Extensive experiments across various PDE benchmarks demonstrate that PIDDM significantly improves PDE satisfaction over several recent and competitive baselines, such as PIDM, DiffusionPDE, and ECI-sampling, with less computation overhead. Our approach can shed light on more efficient and effective strategies for incorporating physical constraints into diffusion models.
Yi Zhang, Peng Wang, Difan Zou