Flow Matching

Momentum

79 papers in the last four weeks, up 365% on the four weeks before. 0.8% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 446

Apr 25, 2026cs.CV

MotionHiFlow: Text-to-motion via hierarchical flow matching

Text-to-motion generation aims to generate 3D human motions that are tightly aligned with the input text while remaining physically plausible and rich in fine-grained detail. Although recent approaches can produce complex and natural movements, they usually operate at only one temporal scale, which limits both semantic alignment and temporal coherence. Inspired by the fact that complex motions are conceptualized hierarchically rather than at a single temporal scale in the human cognitive system, we propose \textit{MotionHiFlow}, a hierarchical flow matching framework to generate motion progressively by constructing flow path from low to high temporal scales. The flows at lower scales capture high-level semantics and coarse motion structures, while flows at higher scales refine temporal details. To link the flows across scales, we introduce a novel cross-scale transition process, ensuring continuity and preserving noise consistency. Furthermore, by integrating a Text-Motion Diffusion Transformer and a topology-aware Motion VAE, MotionHiFlow explicitly models structural dependencies among joints via joint-aware positional encoding and skeletal topology, enabling precise semantic alignment alongside fine-grained motion details. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with ablation studies confirming the effectiveness of the hierarchical design and key components. Code is available at https://github.com/ai-lh/MotionHiFlow.
Apr 23, 2026cs.IT

Null-Space Flow Matching for MIMO Channel Estimation in Latency-Constrained Systems

Accurate yet low-latency channel state information (CSI) acquisition is essential for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. While advanced deep generative models, such as score-based and diffusion models, enable high-fidelity CSI reconstruction from limited pilot observations, they often suffer from high inference latency. To achieve accurate CSI estimation under stringent latency constraints, this paper proposes a null-space flow matching (FM) framework that decomposes pilot-limited MIMO channel estimation into a range-space reconstruction problem and a null-space generation problem. Specifically, the range-space component of the channel is directly recovered from noisy pilot observations, while only the ambiguous null-space component is iteratively refined using an FM-based generative prior. To further improve the robustness of the proposed framework, we introduce a power-law time schedule to better allocate the limited number of refinement steps, along with a noise-aware adaptive correction strategy to suppress channel noise on the refinement trajectory. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a competitive normalized mean square error (NMSE) even under a strict latency budget of around 3 ms, while delivering superior estimation accuracy and faster inference than both model-based and generative baselines.
Apr 22, 2026cs.CV

WFM: 3D Wavelet Flow Matching for Ultrafast Multi-Modal MRI Synthesis

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable quality in multi-modal MRI synthesis, but their computational cost (hundreds of sampling steps and separate models per modality) limits clinical deployment. We observe that this inefficiency stems from an unnecessary starting point: diffusion begins from pure noise, discarding the structural information already present in available MRI sequences. We propose WFM (Wavelet Flow Matching), which instead learns a direct flow from an informed prior, the mean of conditioning modalities in wavelet space, to the target distribution. Because the source and target share underlying anatomy and differ primarily in contrast, this formulation enables accurate synthesis in just 1-2 integration steps. A single 82M-parameter model with class conditioning synthesizes all four BraTS modalities (T1, T1c, T2, FLAIR), replacing four separate diffusion models totaling 326M parameters. On BraTS 2024, WFM achieves 26.8 dB PSNR and 0.94 SSIM, within 1-2 dB of diffusion baselines, while running 250-1000x faster (0.16-0.64s vs. 160s per volume). This speed-quality trade-off makes real-time MRI synthesis practical for clinical workflows. Code is available at https://github.com/yalcintur/WFM.
Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

On the Role of Strain and Vorticity in Numerical Integration Error for Flow Matching

Flow matching generates data by integrating a learned velocity field, where the number of integration steps (NFE) directly determines inference cost. We analyze which properties of the velocity field govern integration error by decomposing the velocity Jacobian into its symmetric part S (strain rate) and antisymmetric part Omega (vorticity). We prove that strain and vorticity play different roles: strain controls exponential error amplification through the logarithmic norm, while vorticity contributes only linearly to the local truncation error. We further show that the optimal transport velocity field is irrotational and has zero material derivative, implying second-order Euler accuracy; for exact displacement interpolation, the associated Lagrangian particle dynamics are integrated exactly by Euler. Motivated by this analysis, we study weighted Jacobian regularization with strain weight alpha and vorticity weight beta. Experiments on 2D synthetic data confirm the main theoretical predictions, showing up to 2.7x lower integration error at NFE=5. Preliminary CIFAR-10 experiments show consistent trends, with a lightweight fine-tuning procedure improving FID by 14 percent at NFE=10 while preserving high-NFE quality.
Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

Tokenised Flow Matching for Hierarchical Simulation Based Inference

The cost of simulator evaluations is a key practical bottleneck for Simulation Based Inference (SBI). In hierarchical settings with shared global parameters and exchangeable site-level parameters and observations, this structure can be exploited to improve simulation efficiency. Existing hierarchical SBI approaches factorise the posterior yet still simulate across multiple sites per training sample; We instead explore likelihood factorisation (LF) to train from single-site simulations. In LF sampling we learn a per-site neural surrogate of the simulator and then assemble synthetic multi-site observations to amortise inference for the full hierarchical posterior. Building on this, we propose Tokenised Flow Matching for Posterior Estimation (TFMPE), a tokenised flow matching approach that supports function-valued observations through likelihood factorisation. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce a benchmark for hierarchical SBI. We validate TFMPE on this benchmark and on realistic infectious disease and computational fluid dynamics models, finding well-calibrated posteriors while reducing computational cost.
Apr 22, 2026cs.CV

Stability-Driven Motion Generation for Object-Guided Human-Human Co-Manipulation

Co-manipulation requires multiple humans to synchronize their motions with a shared object while ensuring reasonable interactions, maintaining natural poses, and preserving stable states. However, most existing motion generation approaches are designed for single-character scenarios or fail to account for payload-induced dynamics. In this work, we propose a flow-matching framework that ensures the generated co-manipulation motions align with the intended goals while maintaining naturalness and effectiveness. Specifically, we first introduce a generative model that derives explicit manipulation strategies from the object's affordance and spatial configuration, which guide the motion flow toward successful manipulation. To improve motion quality, we then design an adversarial interaction prior that promotes natural individual poses and realistic inter-person interactions during co-manipulation. In addition, we also incorporate a stability-driven simulation into the flow matching process, which refines unstable interaction states through sampling-based optimization and directly adjusts the vector field regression to promote more effective manipulation. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves higher contact accuracy, lower penetration, and better distributional fidelity compared to state-of-the-art human-object interaction baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/boycehbz/StaCOM.
Apr 22, 2026cs.CV

Semi-Supervised Flow Matching for Mosaiced and Panchromatic Fusion Imaging

Fusing a low resolution (LR) mosaiced hyperspectral image (HSI) with a high resolution (HR) panchromatic (PAN) image offers a promising avenue for video-rate HR-HSI imaging via single-shot acquisition, yet its severely ill-posed nature remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a novel semi-supervised flow matching framework for mosaiced and PAN image fusion. Unlike previous diffusion-based approaches constrained by specific protocols or handcrafted assumptions, our method seamlessly integrates an unsupervised scheme with flow matching, resulting in a generalizable and efficient generative framework. Specifically, our method follows a two-stage training pipeline. First, we pretrain an unsupervised prior network to produce an initial pseudo HR-HSI. Building on this, we then train a conditional flow matching model to generate the target HR-HSI, introducing a random voting mechanism that iteratively refines the initial HR-HSI estimate, enabling robust and effective fusion. During inference, we employ a conflict-free gradient guidance strategy that ensures spectrally and spatially consistent HR-HSI reconstruction. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior quantitative and qualitative performance by a significant margin compared to representative baselines. Beyond mosaiced and PAN fusion, our approach provides a flexible generative framework that can be readily extended to other image fusion tasks and integrated with unsupervised or blind image restoration algorithms.
Apr 21, 2026cs.LG

Frequency-Forcing: From Scaling-as-Time to Soft Frequency Guidance

While standard flow-matching models transport noise to data uniformly, incorporating an explicit generation order - specifically, establishing coarse, low-frequency structure before fine detail - has proven highly effective for synthesizing natural images. Two recent works offer distinct paradigms for this. K-Flow imposes a hard frequency constraint by reinterpreting a frequency scaling variable as flow time, running the trajectory inside a transformed amplitude space. Latent Forcing provides a soft ordering mechanism by coupling the pixel flow with an auxiliary semantic latent flow via asynchronous time schedules, leaving the pixel interpolation path itself untouched. Viewed from the angle of improving pixel generation, we observe that forcing - guiding generation with an earlier-maturing auxiliary stream - offers a highly compatible route to scale-ordered generation without rewriting the core flow coordinate. Building on this, we propose Frequency-Forcing, which realizes K-Flow's frequency ordering through Latent Forcing's soft mechanism: a standard pixel flow is guided by an auxiliary low-frequency stream that matures earlier in time. Unlike Latent Forcing, whose scratchpad relies on a heavy pretrained encoder (e.g., DINO), our frequency scratchpad is derived from the data itself via a lightweight learnable wavelet packet transform. We term this a self-forcing signal, which avoids external dependencies while learning a basis better adapted to data statistics than the fixed bases used in hard frequency flows. On ImageNet-256, Frequency-Forcing consistently improves FID over strong pixel- and latent-space baselines, and naturally composes with a semantic stream to yield further gains. This illustrates that forcing-based scale ordering is a versatile, path-preserving alternative to hard frequency flows.
Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

MedFlowSeg: Flow Matching for Medical Image Segmentation with Frequency-Aware Attention

Flow matching has recently emerged as a principled framework for learning continuous-time transport maps, enabling efficient ODE-based sampling without relying on stochastic diffusion processes. While generative modeling has shown promise for medical image segmentation, particularly in capturing uncertainty and complex anatomical variability, existing approaches are predominantly based on diffusion models, which require iterative sampling and incur substantial computational overhead. In this work, we propose MedFlowSeg, a conditional flow matching framework that formulates medical image segmentation as learning a time-dependent vector field that transports a simple prior distribution to the target segmentation distribution. Compared to diffusion-based methods, our formulation enables more efficient inference through solving an ordinary differential equation, while preserving the flexibility of generative modeling. To effectively incorporate conditional information, we introduce a dual-conditioning mechanism. Specifically, we propose a Dual-Branch Spatial Attention (DB-SA) module to inject multi-frequency structural priors, and a Frequency-Aware Attention (FA-Attention) module to model interactions between spatial and spectral representations via discrepancy-aware fusion and time-dependent modulation. These components improve the alignment between noisy intermediate states and clean semantic features, leading to better structural consistency and boundary delineation. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple medical imaging modalities, where MedFlowSeg consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, including diffusion-based and flow-based methods.
Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

Allo{SR}2^2: Rectifying One-Step Super-Resolution to Stay Real via Allomorphic Generative Flows

Real-world image super-resolution (Real-SR) has been revolutionized by leveraging the powerful generative priors from Diffusion Models (DMs) and Flow Matching (FM). However, existing one-step methods typically replace Gaussian noise with degraded low-resolution (LR) latents at initialization, introducing a substantial distribution shift that further leads to trajectory deviation and prior collapse under extreme acceleration. To overcome these limitations, we propose Allo{SR}2^2, a novel FM-based framework that rectifies one-step SR flows via allomorphic generative flows to maintain high-fidelity generative realism. Specifically, we utilize SNR-Guided Trajectory Initialization to identify a statistically aligned intermediate state along the pre-trained path to integrate LR representations into the generative flow. To ensure a stable, low-curvature path for one-step inference, we propose Flow-Anchored Trajectory Consistency (FATC), which explicitly regularizes the velocity field of the underlying probability flow. Furthermore, we develop Allomorphic Trajectory Matching (ATM), a self-adversarial distillation strategy that jointly models the SR flow and the generative flow within a unified velocity field, enabling one-step Real-SR while preserving the generative prior. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that Allo{SR}2^2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in one-step Real-SR, offering a superior balance between fidelity and realism while maintaining extreme efficiency.
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.
Apr 20, 2026cs.LG

Fisher Decorator: Refining Flow Policy via a Local Transport Map

Recent advances in flow-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong performance by parameterizing policies via flow matching. However, they still face critical trade-offs among expressiveness, optimality, and efficiency. In particular, existing flow policies interpret the L2L_2 regularization as an upper bound of the 2-Wasserstein distance (W2W_2), which can be problematic in offline settings. This issue stems from a fundamental geometric mismatch: the behavioral policy manifold is inherently anisotropic, whereas the L2L_2 (or upper bound of W2W_2) regularization is isotropic and density-insensitive, leading to systematically misaligned optimization directions. To address this, we revisit offline RL from a geometric perspective and show that policy refinement can be formulated as a local transport map: an initial flow policy augmented by a residual displacement. By analyzing the induced density transformation, we derive a local quadratic approximation of the KL-constrained objective governed by the Fisher information matrix, enabling a tractable anisotropic optimization formulation. By leveraging the score function embedded in the flow velocity, we obtain a corresponding quadratic constraint for efficient optimization. Our results reveal that the optimality gap in prior methods arises from their isotropic approximation. In contrast, our framework achieves a controllable approximation error within a provable neighborhood of the optimal solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across diverse offline RL benchmarks. See project page: https://github.com/ARC0127/Fisher-Decorator.
Apr 20, 2026cs.RO

OFlow: Injecting Object-Aware Temporal Flow Matching for Robust Robotic Manipulation

Robust robotic manipulation requires not only predicting how the scene evolves over time, but also recognizing task-relevant objects in complex scenes. However, existing VLA models face two limitations. They typically act only on the current frame, while future prediction and object-aware reasoning are often learned in separate latent spaces. We propose OFlow (injecting Object-Aware Temporal Flow Matching into VLAs), a framework that addresses both limitations by unifying temporal foresight and object-aware reasoning in a shared semantic latent space. Our method forecasts future latents with temporal flow matching, factorizes them into object-aware representations that emphasize physically relevant cues while filtering task-irrelevant variation, and conditions continuous action generation on these predictions. By integrating OFlow into VLA pipelines, our method enables more reliable control under distribution shifts. Extensive experiments across LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, MetaWorld, and SimplerEnv benchmarks and real-world tasks demonstrate that object-aware foresight consistently enhances robustness and success.
Apr 20, 2026cs.RO

OmniVLA-RL: A Vision-Language-Action Model with Spatial Understanding and Online RL

Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models represent a paradigm shift in embodied AI, yet existing frameworks often struggle with imprecise spatial perception, suboptimal multimodal fusion, and instability in reinforcement learning. To bridge these gaps, we propose OmniVLA-RL, a novel architecture that leverages a Mix-of-Transformers (MoT) design to synergistically integrate reasoning, spatial, and action experts. Furthermore, we introduce Flow-GSPO, which reformulates flow matching as a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) process and integrates it with Group Segmented Policy Optimization (GSPO) to enhance action precision and training robustness. Extensive evaluations on the LIBERO and LIBERO-Plus benchmarks demonstrate that OmniVLA-RL achieves decent overall performance and surpasses mainstream existing methods, effectively overcoming the fundamental limitations of current VLA models.
Apr 19, 2026cs.CV

FlowC2S: Flowing from Current to Succeeding Frames for Fast and Memory-Efficient Video Continuation

This paper introduces a novel methodology for generating fast and memory-efficient video continuations. Our method, dubbed FlowC2S, fine-tunes a pre-trained text-to-video flow model to learn a vector field between the current and succeeding video chunks. Two design choices are key. First, we introduce inherent optimal couplings, utilizing temporally adjacent video chunks during training as a practical proxy for true optimal couplings, resulting in straighter flows. Second, we incorporate target inversion, injecting the inverted latent of the target chunk into the input representation to strengthen correspondences and improve visual fidelity. By flowing directly from current to succeeding frames, instead of the common combination of current frames with noise to generate a video continuation, we reduce the dimensionality of the model input by a factor of two. The proposed method, fine-tuned from LTXV and Wan, surpasses the state-of-the-art scores across quantitative evaluations with FID and FVD, with as few as five neural function evaluations.
Apr 18, 2026physics.flu-dyn

FlowRefiner: Flow Matching-Based Iterative Refinement for 3D Turbulent Flow Simulation

Accurate autoregressive prediction of 3D turbulent flows remains challenging for neural PDE solvers, as small errors in fine-scale structures can accumulate rapidly over rollout. In this paper, we propose FlowRefiner, a flow matching-based iterative refinement framework for 3D turbulent flow simulation. The method replaces stochastic denoising refinement with deterministic ODE-based correction, uses a unified velocity-field regression objective across all refinement stages, and introduces a decoupled sigma schedule that fixes the noise range independently of refinement depth. These design choices yield stable and effective refinement in the small-noise regime. Experiments on large-scale 3D turbulence with rich multi-scale structures show that FlowRefiner achieves state-of-the-art autoregressive prediction accuracy and strong physical consistency. Although developed for turbulent flow simulation, the proposed framework is broadly applicable to iterative refinement problems in scientific modeling.
Apr 18, 2026cs.CV

Can We Build Scene Graphs, Not Classify Them? FlowSG: Progressive Image-Conditioned Scene Graph Generation with Flow Matching

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) unifies object localization and visual relationship reasoning by predicting boxes and subject-predicate-object triples. Yet most pipelines treat SGG as a one-shot, deterministic classification problem rather than a genuinely progressive, generative task. We propose FlowSG, which recasts SGG as continuous-time transport on a hybrid discrete-continuous state: starting from a noised graph, the model progressively grows an image-conditioned scene graph through constraint-aware refinements that jointly synthesize nodes (objects) and edges (predicates). Specifically, we first leverage a VQ-VAE to quantize a scene graph (e.g., continuous visual features) into compact, predictable tokens; a graph Transformer then (i) predicts a conditional velocity field to transport continuous geometry (boxes) and (ii) updates discrete posteriors for categorical tokens (object features and predicate labels), coupling semantics and geometry via flow-conditioned message aggregation. Training combines flow-matching losses for geometry with a discrete-flow objective for tokens, yielding few-step inference and plug-and-play compatibility with standard detectors and segmenters. Extensive experiments on VG and PSG under closed- and open-vocabulary protocols show consistent gains in predicate R/mR and graph-level metrics, validating the mixed discrete-continuous generative formulation over one-shot classification baselines, with an average improvement of about 3 points over the state-of-the-art USG-Par.
Apr 17, 2026cs.CV

The Amazing Stability of Flow Matching

The success of deep generative models in generating high-quality and diverse samples is often attributed to particular architectures and large training datasets. In this paper, we investigate the impact of these factors on the quality and diversity of samples generated by \emph{flow-matching} models. Surprisingly, in our experiments on CelebA-HQ dataset, flow matching remains stable even when pruning 50% of the dataset. That is, the quality and diversity of generated samples are preserved. Moreover, pruning impacts the latent representation only slightly, that is, samples generated by models trained on the full and pruned dataset map to visually similar outputs for a given seed. We observe similar stability when changing the architecture or training configuration, such that the latent representation is maintained under these changes as well. Our results quantify just how strong this stability can be in practice, and help explain the reliability of flow-matching models under various perturbations.
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

Frequency-Aware Flow Matching for High-Quality Image Generation

Flow matching models have emerged as a powerful framework for realistic image generation by learning to reverse a corruption process that progressively adds Gaussian noise. However, because noise is injected in the latent domain, its impact on different frequency components is non-uniform. As a result, during inference, flow matching models tend to generate low-frequency components (global structure) in the early stages, while high-frequency components (fine details) emerge only later in the reverse process. Building on this insight, we propose Frequency-Aware Flow Matching (FreqFlow), a novel approach that explicitly incorporates frequency-aware conditioning into the flow matching framework via time-dependent adaptive weighting. We introduce a two-branch architecture: (1) a frequency branch that separately processes low- and high-frequency components to capture global structure and refine textures and edges, and (2) a spatial branch that synthesizes images in the latent domain, guided by the frequency branch's output. By explicitly integrating frequency information into the generation process, FreqFlow ensures that both large-scale coherence and fine-grained details are effectively modeled low-frequency conditioning reinforces global structure, while high-frequency conditioning enhances texture fidelity and detail sharpness. On the class-conditional ImageNet-256 generation benchmark, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with an FID of 1.38, surpassing the prior diffusion model DiT and flow matching model SiT by 0.79 and 0.58 FID, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/FreqFlow.
Apr 16, 2026eess.IV

RelativeFlow: Taming Medical Image Denoising Learning with Noisy Reference

Medical image denoising (MID) lacks absolutely clean images for supervision, leading to a noisy reference problem that fundamentally limits denoising performance. Existing simulated-supervised discriminative learning (SimSDL) and simulated-supervised generative learning (SimSGL) treat noisy references as clean targets, causing suboptimal convergence or reference-biased learning, while self-supervised learning (SSL) imposes restrictive noise assumptions that are seldom satisfied in realistic MID scenarios. We propose \textbf{RelativeFlow}, a flow matching framework that learns from heterogeneous noisy references and drives inputs from arbitrary quality levels toward a unified high-quality target. RelativeFlow reformulates flow matching by decomposing the absolute noise-to-clean mapping into relative noisier-to-noisy mappings, and realizes this formulation through two key components: 1) consistent transport (CoT), a displacement map that constrains relative flows to be components of and progressively compose a unified absolute flow, and 2) simulation-based velocity field (SVF), which constructs a learnable velocity field using modality-specific degradation operators to support different medical imaging modalities. Extensive experiments on Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance (MR) denoising demonstrate that RelativeFlow significantly outperforms existing methods, taming MID with noisy references.
Apr 16, 2026stat.ML

One-Shot Generative Flows: Existence and Obstructions

We study dynamic measure transport for generative modeling, focusing on transport maps that connect a source measure P0P_0 to a target measure P1P_1 by integrating a velocity field of the form vt(x)=E[X˙t∣Xt=x]v_t(x) = \mathbb{E}[\dot X_t \mid X_t = x], where X∙=(Xt)tX_\bullet = (X_t)_t is a stochastic process satisfying (X0,X1)∼P0⊗P1(X_0,X_1)\sim{P_0}\otimes{P_1} and X˙t\dot X_t is its time derivative. We investigate when X∙X_\bullet induces a \emph{straight-line flow}: a flow whose pointwise acceleration vanishes and is therefore exactly integrable by any first-order method. First, we develop multiple characterizations of straight-line flows in terms of PDEs involving the conditional statistics of the process. Then, we prove that straight-line flows under endpoint independence exhibit a sharp dichotomy. On the one hand, we construct explicit, computable straight-line processes for arbitrary Gaussian endpoints. On the other hand, we show that straight-line processes do not exist for targets with sufficiently well-separated modes. We demonstrate this obstruction through a sequence of increasingly general impossibility theorems that uncover a fundamental relationship between the sample-path behavior of a process with independent endpoints and the space-time geometry of this process' flow map. Taken together, these results provide a structural theory of when straight-line generative flows can, and cannot, exist.
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

LeapAlign: Post-Training Flow Matching Models at Any Generation Step by Building Two-Step Trajectories

This paper focuses on the alignment of flow matching models with human preferences. A promising way is fine-tuning by directly backpropagating reward gradients through the differentiable generation process of flow matching. However, backpropagating through long trajectories results in prohibitive memory costs and gradient explosion. Therefore, direct-gradient methods struggle to update early generation steps, which are crucial for determining the global structure of the final image. To address this issue, we introduce LeapAlign, a fine-tuning method that reduces computational cost and enables direct gradient propagation from reward to early generation steps. Specifically, we shorten the long trajectory into only two steps by designing two consecutive leaps, each skipping multiple ODE sampling steps and predicting future latents in a single step. By randomizing the start and end timesteps of the leaps, LeapAlign leads to efficient and stable model updates at any generation step. To better use such shortened trajectories, we assign higher training weights to those that are more consistent with the long generation path. To further enhance gradient stability, we reduce the weights of gradient terms with large magnitude, instead of completely removing them as done in previous works. When fine-tuning the Flux model, LeapAlign consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GRPO-based and direct-gradient methods across various metrics, achieving superior image quality and image-text alignment.
Apr 16, 2026cs.AI

Towards Faster Language Model Inference Using Mixture-of-Experts Flow Matching

Flow matching retains the generation quality of diffusion models while enabling substantially faster inference, making it a compelling paradigm for generative modeling. However, when applied to language modeling, it exhibits fundamental limitations in representing complex latent distributions with irregular geometries, such as anisotropy and multimodality. To address these challenges, we propose a mixture-of-experts flow matching (MoE-FM) framework, which captures complex global transport geometries in latent space by decomposing them into locally specialized vector fields. Building on MoE-FM, we develop a non-autoregressive (NAR) language modeling approach, named YAN, instantiated with both Transformer and Mamba architectures. Across multiple downstream tasks, YAN achieves generation quality on par with both autoregressive (AR) and diffusion-based NAR language models, while requiring as few as three sampling steps. This yields a 40×40\times speedup over AR baselines and up to a 103×10^3\times speedup over diffusion language models, demonstrating substantial efficiency advantages for language modeling.
Apr 6, 2026cs.CV

Training-Free Refinement of Flow Matching with Divergence-based Sampling

Flow-based models learn a target distribution by modeling a marginal velocity field, defined as the average of sample-wise velocities connecting each sample from a simple prior to the target data. When sample-wise velocities conflict at the same intermediate state, however, this averaged velocity can misguide samples toward low-density regions, degrading generation quality. To address this issue, we propose the Flow Divergence Sampler (FDS), a training-free framework that refines intermediate states before each solver step. Our key finding reveals that the severity of this misguidance is quantified by the divergence of the marginal velocity field that is readily computable during inference with a well-optimized model. FDS exploits this signal to steer states toward less ambiguous regions. As a plug-and-play framework compatible with standard solvers and off-the-shelf flow backbones, FDS consistently improves fidelity across various generation tasks including text-to-image synthesis, and inverse problems.
Apr 5, 2026cs.CV

TORA: Topological Representation Alignment for 3D Shape Assembly

Flow-matching methods for 3D shape assembly learn point-wise velocity fields that transport parts toward assembled configurations, yet they receive no explicit guidance about which cross-part interactions should drive the motion. We introduce TORA, a topology-first representation alignment framework that distills relational structure from a frozen pretrained 3D encoder into the flow-matching backbone during training. We first realize this via simple instantiation, token-wise cosine matching, which injects the learned geometric descriptors from the teacher representation. We then extend to employ a Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) loss to match the similarity structure between student and teacher representations for enhanced topological alignment. Through systematic probing of diverse 3D encoders, we show that geometry- and contact-centric teacher properties, not semantic classification ability, govern alignment effectiveness, and that alignment is most beneficial at later transformer layers where spatial structure naturally emerges. TORA introduces zero inference overhead while yielding two consistent benefits: faster convergence (up to 6.9×\times) and improved accuracy in-distribution, along with greater robustness under domain shift. Experiments on five benchmarks spanning geometric, semantic, and inter-object assembly demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with particularly pronounced gains in zero-shot transfer to unseen real-world and synthetic datasets. Project page: https://nahyuklee.github.io/tora.
Mar 27, 2026cs.CV

SemConFlow: Semantic Grounding of Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Contrastive Flow-Matching

While the field of co-speech gesture generation has seen significant advances, producing holistic, semantically grounded gestures remains a challenge. Existing approaches rely on external semantic retrieval methods, which limit their generalisation capability due to dependency on predefined linguistic rules. Flow-matching-based methods produce promising results; however, the network is optimised using only semantically congruent samples without exposure to negative examples, leading to learning rhythmic gestures rather than sparse motion, such as iconic and metaphoric gestures. Furthermore, by modelling body parts in isolation, the majority of methods fail to maintain crossmodal consistency. We introduce a Contrastive Flow Matching-based co-speech gesture generation model that uses mismatched audio-text conditions as negatives, training the velocity field to follow the correct motion trajectory while repelling semantically incongruent trajectories. Our model ensures cross-modal coherence by embedding text, audio, and holistic motion into a composite latent space via cosine and contrastive objectives. Extensive experiments and a user study demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two datasets, BEAT2 and SHOW.
Mar 16, 2026cs.LG

Generative Inverse Design with Abstention via Diagonal Flow Matching

Inverse design aims to find design parameters xx achieving target performance y∗y^*. Generative approaches learn bidirectional mappings between designs and labels, enabling diverse solution sampling. However, standard conditional flow matching (CFM), when adapted to inverse problems by pairing labels with design parameters, exhibits strong sensitivity to their arbitrary ordering and scaling, leading to unstable training. We introduce Diagonal Flow Matching (Diag--CFM), which resolves this through a zero-anchoring strategy that pairs design coordinates with noise and labels with zero, making the learning problem provably invariant to coordinate permutations. This yields substantially lower round-trip error than CFM and invertible neural network baselines across design dimensions up to P=784P{=}784, including order-of-magnitude gains on several benchmarks. We develop two architecture-intrinsic uncertainty metrics, Zero-Deviation and Self-Consistency, that enable three practical capabilities: selecting the best candidate among multiple generations, abstaining from unreliable predictions, and detecting out-of-distribution targets; consistently outperforming ensemble and general-purpose alternatives across all tasks. We validate on airfoil, gas turbine combustor, scalable analytical benchmarks, a photonics inverse-design task, and an image-statistics benchmark.
Mar 16, 2026cs.LG

Safe Flow Q-Learning: Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning with Reachability-Based Flow Policies

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks reward-maximizing policies from static datasets under strict safety constraints. Existing methods often rely on soft expected-cost objectives or iterative generative inference, which can be insufficient for safety-critical real-time control. We propose Safe Flow Q-Learning (SafeFQL), which extends FQL to safe offline RL by combining a Hamilton--Jacobi reachability-inspired safety value function with an efficient one-step flow policy. SafeFQL learns the safety value via a self-consistency Bellman recursion, trains a flow policy by behavioral cloning, and distills it into a one-step actor for reward-maximizing safe action selection without rejection sampling at deployment. Empirically, SafeFQL trades modestly higher offline training cost for substantially lower inference latency than diffusion-style safe generative baselines, which is advantageous for real-time safety-critical deployment. Across boat navigation, and Safety Gymnasium MuJoCo tasks, SafeFQL matches or exceeds prior offline safe RL performance while substantially reducing constraint violations.
Mar 16, 2026cs.CV

WiT: Waypoint Diffusion Transformers for Alleviating Trajectory Conflict in Pixel-Space Image Generation

While recent Flow Matching models avoid the reconstruction bottlenecks of latent autoencoders by operating directly in pixel space, the raw pixel manifold provides little explicit semantic organization, making target-specific transport directions difficult for a shared finite-capacity vector field to distinguish. When different transport requirements are locally entangled in this way, their learning signals can interfere and hinder optimization, a phenomenon we refer to as trajectory conflict. To alleviate trajectory conflict while preserving direct generation in pixel space, we propose Waypoint Diffusion Transformers (WiT), which introduces explicit semantic routing into pixel-space generation. WiT structures pixel-space prediction through compact semantic waypoints projected from pre-trained vision representations, providing a semantically organized intermediate representation that complements direct pixel prediction. During ODE integration, a lightweight Waypoints Predictor dynamically infers the semantic waypoint from the current noisy state, and the predicted waypoint continuously conditions the primary Pixel Space Generator through our Just-Pixel AdaLN mechanism. This spatially varying semantic modulation reorganizes the finite-capacity learning problem and helps the model preserve target-specific transport directions while retaining generation entirely in pixel space. Experiments on ImageNet 2012 demonstrate consistent improvements over strong pixel-space baselines across model scales, with WiT-H/16 achieving an FID of 1.79. Code will be released at https://hainuo-wang.github.io/WiT.
Mar 13, 2026cs.SD

Mask2Flow-TSE: Two-Stage Target Speaker Extraction with Masking and Flow Matching

Target speaker extraction (TSE) extracts the target speaker's voice from overlapping speech given a reference utterance. Existing masking-based approaches are lightweight and effective but suffer from an inability to synthesize missing content, leading to degraded perceptual quality. On the other hand, recent generative TSE models typically synthesize high-quality speech with diffusion, but require numerous iterative steps resulting in high computational costs and latency. We propose Mask2Flow-TSE, a two-stage framework combining the strengths of both paradigms. We introduce the deletion/insertion (D/I) proportion, an analytical tool that reveals early flow steps predominantly remove signal components rather than synthesize them. Based on this finding, we decouple deletion from insertion: a masking-based module handles the deletion-dominant early steps, while a single flow-matching step performs the remaining insertion for high-quality reconstruction. Specifically, the first stage uses lightweight convolution for the masking module, while the second stage employs a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) adapted for TSE with speaker conditioning. Unlike prior approaches that start from Gaussian noise, our method starts from the masked spectrogram, enabling high-quality reconstruction in a single inference step. Experiments show that Mask2Flow-TSE produces high-quality extractions with only 85M parameters and one-step inference, while preserving clean single-speaker inputs with minimal degradation.