Overview

Flow matching learns a velocity field that moves samples from a simple source, often Gaussian noise, toward a target data distribution. Conditional flow matching trains the field on paths between source and data samples, while optimal-transport couplings and rectified paths aim to make those trajectories easier to learn and integrate with an ordinary differential equation solver. Extensions handle discrete data, curved manifolds and symmetries, physical constraints, and applications from image and speech generation to robotics, scientific forecasting, and inverse problems. A central challenge is getting high fidelity and diverse, reliable samples with few solver steps; theory on convergence and stability is advancing, but the best paths, source distributions, and schedules depend on the task.

Latest papers

663 papers123 papers in the last four weeks, up 68% on the four weeks before. 0.7% of all new papers.

May 14, 2026

SpectraFlow: Unifying Structural Pretraining and Frequency Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation remains challenging in low-data regimes, where scarce annotations often yield poor generalization and ambiguous boundaries with missing fine structures. Recent self-supervised pretraining has improved transferability, but it often exhibits a texture bias. In contrast, accurate segmentation is inherently geometry-aware and depends on both topological consistency and precise boundary preservation. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage framework that couples structure-aware encoder pretraining with boundary-oriented decoding. In Stage-1, we aim to learn structure-aware representations for downstream segmentation in low-data regimes. To this end, we propose Mixed-Domain MeanFlow Pretraining, which aligns images and binary masks in a shared latent space through latent transport regression, where masks act as conditional structural guidance rather than prediction targets, making the pretraining task-agnostic. To further improve training stability under scarce supervision, we incorporate a lightweight Dispersive Loss to prevent representation collapse. In Stage-2, we fine-tune the pretrained encoder with a lightweight decoder that combines Direct Attentional Fusion for adaptive cross-scale gating and Frequency-Directional Dynamic Convolution for high-frequency boundary refinement under appearance variation. Experiments on ISIC-2016, Kvasir-SEG, and GlaS demonstrate consistent gains over state-of-the-art methods, with improved robustness in low-data settings and sharper boundary delineation.
May 13, 2026

WarmPrior: Straightening Flow-Matching Policies with Temporal Priors

Generative policies based on diffusion and flow matching have become a dominant paradigm for visuomotor robotic control. We show that replacing the standard Gaussian source distribution with WarmPrior, a simple temporally grounded prior constructed from readily available recent action history, consistently improves success rates on robotic manipulation tasks. We trace this gain to markedly straighter probability paths, echoing the effect of optimal-transport couplings in Rectified Flow. Beyond standard behavior cloning, WarmPrior also reshapes the exploration distribution in prior-space reinforcement learning, improving both sample efficiency and final performance. Collectively, these results identify the source distribution as an important and underexplored design axis in generative robot control.
May 13, 2026

Sampling from Flow Language Models via Marginal-Conditioned Bridges

Flow Language Models (FLMs) are a recently introduced class of language models which adapt continuous flow matching for one-hot encoded token sequences. Their denoisers have a special structure absent from generic continuous diffusion models: each block of the denoising mean is a posterior marginal distribution over the clean token at that position. Standard DDPM-style samplers collapse these marginals to a single conditional-mean endpoint and bridge toward this simplex-valued point, which is generally not a valid one-hot sequence. We argue that the natural sampler for an FLM is instead posterior-predictive. At each reverse step, we sample a clean one-hot endpoint from the factorized posterior defined by the FLM token marginals, and then sample the next continuous state from the analytic Ornstein--Uhlenbeck bridge conditioned on that endpoint. The method is training-free, uses the same model evaluations as standard sampling, and gives a principled interface for token-level decoding controls such as temperature scaling and nucleus truncation. We show that, under exact posterior marginals, the endpoint approximation error is exactly the conditional multi-information among token positions. The induced one-step bridge kernel preserves all token-wise posterior-predictive marginals and loses only the residual cross-position dependence. Finally, we prove a Girsanov path-space comparison showing that the marginal-conditioned bridge has a no-larger denoising-error term than the frozen conditional-mean bridge, with strict improvement whenever intermediate coordinate-wise bridge observations reveal additional information about the clean token. Experiments with FLMs show that the sampler improves the quality--diversity tradeoff. Code is available at: github.com/imbirik/mcb.
May 13, 2026

Path-independent Flow Matching for Multi-parameter Generative Dynamics

Flow Matching is a powerful framework for learning transport maps between probability distributions. Yet its standard single-parameter formulation is not designed to capture multi-parameter variations where the resulting transport should be path-independent. Path independence is crucial because it ensures that transformations depend only on the initial and target distributions, not on the specific path. In this work, we introduce Path-independent Flow Matching (PiFM), a method for learning vector fields whose induced flows yield path-independent transport between distributions. We show that PiFM generalizes Flow Matching to higher-dimensional parameter domains while enforcing structural conditions that ensure consistency of composed transformations. In addition, we show that, under suitable assumptions, PiFM approximates the Wasserstein barycenter, linking the framework to a notion of distributional interpolation. To enable practical training, we propose a tractable, simulation-free objective that regresses onto multi-parameter conditional probability paths. We showcase empirically that PiFM outperforms other approaches on both synthetic and real world data in interpolating path-independent trajectories and generating desired out of distribution samples.
May 13, 2026

Support-Conditioned Flow Matching Is Kernel Smoothing

Generative models are often conditioned on a small set of examples via cross-attention. Under the Gaussian optimal-transport path, we show that the exact velocity field induced by a finite support set is a Nadaraya--Watson kernel smoother whose bandwidth decreases with flow time, from broad averaging at early steps to nearest-neighbor at late steps. A single Gaussian-kernel attention head exactly computes this field, connecting cross-attention conditioning to classical kernel theory. The theory predicts three failure regimes: nearest-neighbor collapse of the kernel at high dimension, mismatch between the isotropic kernel and the data geometry, and insufficient support for nonparametric estimation. Experiments on Gaussian mixtures, spherical shells, and DINOv2 ImageNet features confirm that learned conditioning improves in precisely these regimes, and that IP-Adapter's cross-attention implements approximate NW smoothing in practice.
May 13, 2026

GeoFlowVLM: Geometry-Aware Joint Uncertainty for Frozen Vision-Language Embedding

Standard dual-encoder vision-language models that map images and text to deterministic points on a shared unit hypersphere through ℓ2\ell_2 normalization typically expose neither aleatoric uncertainty (cross-modal ambiguity) nor epistemic uncertainty (lack of training-distribution support). Existing post-hoc methods either recover at most one of the two uncertainty components, or ignore the hyperspherical geometry of these models' embeddings. We propose GeoFlowVLM as a post-hoc adapter that learns the joint distribution of paired ℓ2\ell_2-normalised dual-encoder VLM embeddings on the product hypersphere Sd−1×Sd−1\mathbb{S}^{d-1} \times \mathbb{S}^{d-1} via Riemannian flow matching with a single masked velocity field. A consistency result shows that, in the population limit, the trained network exposes the joint flow and both cross-modal conditional flows as valid Riemannian flow-matching velocity fields on their respective domains. We derive two quantities from this single model: a conditional retrieval entropy that quantifies aleatoric ambiguity with a decision-theoretic interpretation via a Fano-type bound, and a marginal-typicality epistemic score justified by an exact chain-rule decomposition of the joint NLL. This decomposition isolates a cross-modal pointwise-mutual-information term that is structurally discriminative rather than epistemic, and is empirically the only consistently uninformative standalone component. Empirically, the entropy tracks Recall@1 with near-ideal monotonic calibration across three retrieval benchmarks in both directions, and the marginal-typicality sum yields consistently calibrated selective accuracy across four zero-shot classification benchmarks.
May 13, 2026

Asymmetric Flow Models

Flow-based generation in high-dimensional pixel spaces is difficult because velocity prediction requires modeling high-dimensional noise, even when data has strong low-rank structure. We present Asymmetric Flow Modeling (AsymFlow), a rank-asymmetric velocity parameterization that restricts noise prediction to a low-rank subspace while keeping data prediction full-dimensional. From this asymmetric prediction, AsymFlow analytically recovers the full-dimensional velocity, leaving the network architecture and the standard flow-matching training and sampling procedures unchanged. On ImageNet 256×\times256, AsymFlow achieves a leading 1.57 FID, outperforming prior DiT/JiT-like pixel diffusion models by a large margin. AsymFlow also provides the first-ever route for finetuning pretrained latent flow models into pixel-space models: aligning the low-rank pixel subspace to the latent space gives a seamless initialization that preserves the latent model's high-level semantics and structure, so finetuning mainly improves low-level mismatches rather than relearning pixel generation. We show that the pixel AsymFlow model finetuned from FLUX.2 klein 9B establishes a new state of the art for pixel-space text-to-image generation, beating its latent base on HPSv3, DPG-Bench, and GenEval while qualitatively showing substantially improved visual realism.
May 12, 2026

Constraint-Aware Flow Matching: Decision Aligned End-to-End Training for Constrained Sampling

Deep generative models provide state-of-the-art performance across a wide array of applications, with recent studies showing increasing applicability for science and engineering. Despite a growing corpus of literature focused on the integration of physics-based constraints into the generation process, existing approaches fail to enforce strict constraint satisfaction while maintaining sample quality. In particular, training-free constrained sampling methods, while providing per-sample feasibility guarantees, introduce a fundamental mismatch between the training objective and the constrained sampling procedure, often leading to performance degradation. Identifying this training-sampling misalignment as a central limitation of current constrained generative modeling approaches, this paper proposes Constraint-Aware Flow Matching, a novel end-to-end framework that explicitly incorporates constraint projections into the training objective. By aligning the model's learned dynamics with the constrained sampling process, the proposed method mitigates distributional shift induced by projection-based corrections, enabling high-quality constrained generation. The proposed approach is evaluated on three challenging real-world benchmarks, illustrating the generality and efficacy of the method.
May 12, 2026

Aligning Flow Map Policies with Optimal Q-Guidance

Generative policies based on expressive model classes, such as diffusion and flow matching, are well-suited to complex control problems with highly multimodal action distributions. Their expressivity, however, comes at a significant inference cost: generating each action typically requires simulating many steps of the generative process, compounding latency across sequential decision-making rollouts. We introduce flow map policies, a novel class of generative policies designed for fast action generation by learning to take arbitrary-size jumps including one-step jumps-across the generative dynamics of existing flow-based policies. We instantiate flow map policies for offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) and formulate online adaptation as a trust-region optimization problem that improves the critic's Q-value while remaining close to the offline policy. We theoretically derive FLOW MAP Q-GUIDANCE (FMQ), a principled closed-form learning target that is optimal for adapting offline flow map policies under a critic-guided trust-region constraint. We further introduce Q-GUIDED BEAM SEARCH (QGBS), a stochastic flow-map sampler that combines renoising with beam search to enable iterative inference-time refinement. Across 12 challenging robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks from OGBench and RoboMimic, FMQ achieves state-of-the-art performance in offline-to-online RL, outperforming the previous one-step policy MVP by a relative improvement of 21.3% on the average success rate.
May 12, 2026

Discrete Flow Matching for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning

Many reinforcement learning (RL) tasks have discrete action spaces, but most generative policy methods based on diffusion and flow matching are designed for continuous control. Meanwhile, generative policies usually rely heavily on offline datasets and offline-to online RL is itself challenging, as the policy must improve from new interaction without losing useful behavior learned from static data. To address those challenges, we introduce DRIFT, an online fine-tuning method that updates an offline pretrained continuous time Markov chain (CTMC) policy with an advantage-weighted discrete flow matching loss. To preserve useful pretrained knowledge, we add a path-space penalty that regularizes the full CTMC trajectory distribution, rather than only the final action distribution. For large discrete action spaces, we introduce a candidate-set approximation that updates the actor over a small subset of actions sampled from reference-policy rollouts and uniform exploration. Our theoretical analysis shows that focusing on a small set of high probability actions can reduce computation while keeping the approximation error small, making our method practical for large action spaces. We evaluate on macro-action MinAtar games where offline-pretrained DRIFT outperforms its online-only counterpart across all five games and achieves the highest mean return on three and on oracle free Jericho, DRIFT achieves a mean normalized score of 7.3% with a lightweight GRU encoder, outperforming the evaluated pretrained language-model baselines. Ablations demonstrate the importance of appropriately weighted path-space regularization and reference-guided candidate construction.
May 12, 2026

Morphologically Equivariant Flow Matching for Bimanual Mobile Manipulation

Mobile manipulation requires coordinated control of high-dimensional, bimanual robots. Imitation learning methods have been broadly used to solve these robotic tasks, yet typically ignore the bilateral morphological symmetry inherent in such systems. We argue that morphological symmetry is an underexplored but crucial inductive bias for learning in bimanual mobile manipulation: knowing how to solve a task in one configuration directly determines how to solve its mirrored counterpart. In this paper, we formalize this symmetry prior and show that it constrains optimal bimanual policies to be ambidextrous and equivariant under reflections across the robot's sagittal plane. We introduce a C2\mathbb{C}_2-equivariant flow matching policy that enforces reflective symmetry either via a regularized training loss or an equivariant velocity network. Across planar and 6-DoF mobile manipulation tasks, symmetry-informed policies consistently improve sample efficiency and achieve zero-shot generalization to mirrored configurations absent from the training distribution. We further validate this zero-shot generalization capability on a real-world manipulation task with a TIAGo++ robot. Together, our findings establish morphological symmetry as an effective, generalizable, and scalable inductive bias for ambidextrous generative policy learning.
May 12, 2026

Expected Batch Optimal Transport Plans and Consequences for Flow Matching

Solving optimal transport (OT) on random minibatches is a common surrogate for exact OT in large-scale learning. In flow matching (FM), this surrogate is used to obtain OT-like couplings that can straighten probability paths and reduce numerical integration cost. Yet, the population-level coupling induced by repeated minibatch OT remains only partially understood. We formalize this coupling as the expected batch OT plan π‾k\overlineπ_{k}, obtained by averaging empirical OT plans over independent minibatches of size kk. We then establish its large-batch consistency and, in the semidiscrete case relevant to generative modeling, derive rates for both the transport-cost bias and the convergence of π‾k\overlineπ_{k} to the OT plan. For FM, this yields a population coupling whose induced velocity field is regular enough to define a unique flow from the source to the discrete target. We finally quantify how OT batch size interacts with numerical integration in a tractable two-atom model and in synthetic and image experiments.
May 12, 2026

When Policy Entropy Constraint Fails: Preserving Diversity in Flow-based RLHF via Perceptual Entropy

RLHF is widely used to align flow-matching text-to-image models with human preferences, but often leads to severe diversity collapse after fine-tuning. In RL, diversity is often assumed to correlate with policy entropy, motivating entropy regularization. However, we show this intuition breaks in flow models: policy entropy remains constant, even while perceptual diversity collapses. We explain this mismatch both theoretically and empirically: the constant entropy arises from the fixed, pre-defined noise schedule, while the diversity collapse is driven by the mode-seeking nature of policy gradients. As a result, policy entropy fails to prevent the model from converging to a narrow high-reward region in the perceptual space. To this end, we introduce perceptual entropy that captures diversity in a perceptual space and maintains the property of standard entropy. Building upon this insight, we propose two entropy-regularized strategies, Perceptual Entropy Constraint and Perceptual Constraints on Generation Space, to preserve perceptual diversity and improve the quality. Experiments across two base models, neural and rule-based rewards, and three perceptual spaces demonstrate consistent gains in the quality-diversity trade-off; PEC achieves the best overall score of 0.734 (vs. baseline's 0.366); a complementary setting of PEC further reaches a diversity average of 0.989 (vs. baseline's 0.047). Our project page (https://xiaofeng-tan.github.io/projects/PEC) is publicly available.
May 12, 2026

Sharpen Your Flow: Sharpness-Aware Sampling for Flow Matching

Flow matching models generate samples by numerically integrating a learned velocity field, with each integration step requiring a neural network evaluation. Fast generation therefore requires using a small fixed evaluation budget effectively: the key question is not only how to integrate the flow, but where the sampler should spend its steps. We propose SharpEuler, a training-free sampler that profiles a pretrained model offline by estimating where the learned velocity field changes most rapidly along calibration trajectories. This finite-difference estimate defines a solver-aware sharpness profile, which is smoothed and converted by a quantile transform into a timestep grid for any desired inference budget. At test time, sampling remains ordinary Euler integration with the same number of model evaluations as a uniform schedule. We justify SharpEuler using three principles: a numerical principle identifying trajectory acceleration as the leading source of Euler discretization error, a variational principle deriving sharpness-based power-law timestep densities, and a statistical guarantee showing that the finite-sample calibrated sampler is stable at the terminal distribution level. Our experiments show that SharpEuler improves sample quality at fixed budgets, reducing inter-mode leakage and increasing mode coverage.
May 11, 2026

Operator-Guided Model Reduction for Generative Sampling in Lattice Field Theory

Neural generative samplers for lattice field theory can be costly to train and evaluate. When they miss modes or assign them incorrect relative weights, biased observables do not reveal which collective variables are responsible. We project a trained flow-matching velocity onto vector fields built from lattice operators and Fourier modes. In two-dimensional lattice φ4φ^4 theory, the projection separates changes in the overall magnetization from the lowest nonzero-momentum fluctuations and guides an explicit invertible proposal that treats them separately. Allowing the amplitude of the lowest nonzero-momentum fluctuations to depend on the magnetization improves the overlap between the proposal and target distributions, while the same two-parameter modification at higher momenta gives smaller improvements. The Metropolis--Hastings correction defines a Markov chain with the target Boltzmann distribution as its stationary law, and the normalized proposal density yields finite-volume partition-function estimates consistent with an independent HMC calculation. At the larger tested volume, the overlap between the proposal and target distributions deteriorates substantially, limiting the range over which the same parameterization remains effective.
May 11, 2026

Reinforce Adjoint Matching: Scaling RL Post-Training of Diffusion and Flow-Matching Models

Diffusion and flow-matching models scale because pretraining is supervised regression: a clean sample is noised analytically, and a model regresses against a closed-form target. RL post-training aligns the model with a reward. In image generation, this makes samples compose objects correctly, render text legibly, and match human preferences. Existing methods rely on costly SDE rollouts, reward gradients, or surrogate losses, sacrificing pretraining's regression structure. We show that the structure extends to RL post-training. Under KL-regularized reward maximization, the optimal generative process tilts the clean-endpoint distribution towards samples with higher reward and leaves the noising law unchanged. Combining this with the adjoint-matching optimality condition and a REINFORCE identity, we derive Reinforce Adjoint Matching (RAM): a consistency loss that corrects the pretraining target with the reward. At each step, we draw a clean endpoint from the current model, evaluate its reward, noise it as in pretraining, and regress. No SDE rollouts, backward adjoint sweeps, or reward gradients are required. Like the pretraining objective, RAM is simple and scales. On Stable Diffusion 3.5M, RAM achieves the highest reward on composability, text rendering, and human preference, reaching Flow-GRPO's peak reward in up to 50×50\times fewer training steps.
May 11, 2026

Follow the Mean: Reference-Guided Flow Matching

Existing approaches to controllable generation typically rely on fine-tuning, auxiliary networks, or test-time search. We show that flow matching admits a different control interface: adaptation through examples. For deterministic interpolants, the velocity field is solely governed by a conditional endpoint mean, so shifting this mean shifts the flow itself, and a pretrained model can be steered simply by changing the reference set it follows. We instantiate this idea in two forms. Reference-Mean Guidance is training-free. It computes a closed-form correction to the endpoint mean from a reference bank and applies it to a frozen FLUX.2-klein (4B) model, controlling color, identity, style, and structure while the prompt, seed, and weights stay fixed. Semi-Parametric Guidance builds the same principle into a trained model through an explicit mean anchor and a learned residual refiner, matching the quality of an unconditional DiT-B/4 on AFHQv2 while allowing the reference set to be swapped at inference time. Together, these results point to a broader direction: generative models that adapt through data rather than parameter updates.
May 10, 2026

Kinetic-Optimal Scheduling with Moment Correction for Metric-Induced Discrete Flow Matching in Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech

Metric-induced discrete flow matching (MI-DFM) exploits token-latent geometry for discrete generation, but its practical use is limited by two issues: heuristic schedulers requiring hyperparameter search, and finite-step path-tracking error from its first-order continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) solver. We address both issues. First, we derive a kinetic-optimal scheduler for prescribed scalar-parameterized probability paths, and instantiate it for MI-DFM as a training-free numerical schedule that traverses the path at constant Fisher-Rao speed. Second, we introduce a finite-step moment correction that adjusts the jump probability while preserving the CTMC jump destination distribution. We validate the resulting method, GibbsTTS, on codec-based zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS). Under controlled comparisons with a unified architecture and large-scale dataset, GibbsTTS achieves the best objective naturalness and is preferred in subjective evaluations over masked discrete generative baselines. Additionally, in comparison with the evaluated state-of-the-art TTS systems, GibbsTTS shows strong speaker similarity, achieving the highest similarity on three of four test sets and ranking second on the fourth. Project page: https://ydqmkkx.github.io/GibbsTTSProject
May 10, 2026

Noise-Started One-Step Real-World Super-Resolution via LR-Conditioned SplitMeanFlow and GAN Refinement

Pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have shown strong potential for real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR), owing to their noise-started generation process that enables realistic texture synthesis and captures the one-to-many nature of super-resolution. However, diffusion-based Real-ISR methods still face a fundamental efficiency-quality trade-off. Multi-step methods generate high-quality results by iteratively denoising random Gaussian noise under LR conditioning, but suffer from slow sampling. Recent one-step methods greatly improve efficiency, yet they typically replace noise-started generation with direct LR-to-HR restoration, which weakens stochasticity and limits realistic detail synthesis. To address this issue, we propose SMFSR, a noise-started one-step Real-ISR framework via LR-conditioned SplitMeanFlow and GAN refinement. SMFSR preserves the random-noise starting point of diffusion models and learns a direct noise-to-HR mapping conditioned on the LR image. To this end, Interval Splitting Consistency distills the multi-step generative trajectory into a single average-velocity prediction, enabling efficient one-step generation. To compensate for the reduced opportunity for progressive refinement, we further introduce a GAN refinement stage, where a DINOv3-based discriminator enhances realistic texture synthesis and variational score distillation aligns the generated outputs with the natural image distribution under a frozen diffusion teacher. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMFSR achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality among one-step diffusion-based Real-ISR methods while retaining fast single-step inference.
May 10, 2026

On Variance Reduction in Learning Mean Flows

One-step generative modeling has emerged as a leading approach for amortizing the inference cost of diffusion and flow-matching models. Among distillation-free methods, MeanFlow training is notoriously unstable, with non-decreasing loss and unbounded gradient variance. In this work, we establish a theory that attributes this pathology to a misuse of the conditional velocity field. We show that the conditional velocity plays two distinct statistical roles in the loss: both as an unbiased regression target and as a Monte Carlo control variate in a Jacobi-vector product, with the original MeanFlow loss assigning the wrong coefficient to the latter. We derive the optimal coefficient in closed form and show that a family of fixes in concurrent works corresponds to different practical realizations of the same optimum. A controlled sweep of this coefficient on two-dimensional benchmarks and on a latent Diffusion Transformer recovers the predicted bias-variance ordering. Our DiT experiment also reveals a quantitative FID-MSE landscape mismatch. Specifically, although the gradient-MSE is minimized at an interior coefficient value near β ⁣= ⁣0.94β\!=\!0.94, the coefficient that minimizes FID prefers to use conditional velocity directly at the unbiased corner. Our analysis therefore explains why MeanFlow is unstable and unifies its concurrent remedies, and shows that the variance-optimal coefficient need not coincide with the quality-optimal one.
May 9, 2026

Physics-Informed Neural PDE Solvers via Spatio-Temporal MeanFlow

Deep learning paradigms, such as PINNs and neural operators, have significantly advanced the solving of PDEs. However, they often struggle to capture the continuous integral nature of physical systems, relying either on pointwise residuals that ignore the integral perspective or on pre-discretized temporal grids. Drawing inspiration from MeanFlow, a continuous-time integrator recently developed to efficiently solve generative ODEs, we introduce Spatio-Temporal MeanFlow, which functions as a novel PDE solver learning the finite-interval evolution of physical states. By substituting the generative velocity field with the physical PDE operator, we transform multi-step numerical integration into an efficient prediction with a freely controllable integration length. Crucially, we extend the original MeanFlow constraint from the temporal to the spatio-temporal domain, coupling time evolution with spatial consistency. This yields a unified framework naturally accommodating both time-dependent and stationary PDEs. Comprehensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves superior accuracy and inference efficiency over representative baselines. Furthermore, the proposed integral constraint enables excellent generalization to out-of-distribution initial conditions and varying spatial resolutions.
May 9, 2026

Discrete Flow Matching: Convergence Guarantees Under Minimal Assumptions

Flow Matching has recently emerged as a popular class of generative models for simulating a target distribution μ1μ_1 from samples drawn from a source distribution μ0μ_0. This framework relies on a fixed coupling between μ0μ_0 and μ1μ_1, and on a deterministic or stochastic bridge to define an interpolating process between the two distributions. The time marginals of this process can then be approximately sampled by estimating the transition rates, or more generally the generator, of its Markovian projection. This framework has recently been extended to the case of discrete source and target distributions, under the name Discrete Flow Matching (DFM). However, theoretical guarantees for such models remain scarce. In this paper, we study two DFM models on Zmd={0,…,m−1}d\mathbb{Z}_m^d = \{0,\ldots,m-1\}^d, sampled through time discretization, and derive non-asymptotic associated bounds for both of them. In contrast to previous work, we establish non-asymptotic bounds in Kullback--Leibler divergence for the early-stopped version of the target distribution. We also derive explicit convergence guarantees in total variation distance with respect to the true target distribution. Importantly, these bounds rely only on an approximation error assumption, relaxing standard score assumptions used in earlier works, while also yielding improved dependence on the vocabulary size mm and the dimension dd.
May 9, 2026

Restoration-Aligned Generative Flow Models for Blind Motion Deblurring

Generative flow models offer powerful priors learned from large-scale natural images, but directly adapting them to restoration tasks such as motion deblurring causes severe fidelity degradation, as their training objective is inherently misaligned with restoration. We present DeblurFlow, a framework that resolves this misalignment by reformulating the flow trajectory itself: we replace the noise endpoint with the blur observation, which makes the underlying vector field coincide with the residual error between blur and clean images. Under this formulation, the standard flow matching loss naturally takes the form of a residual loss, allowing pretrained flow models to be optimized under restoration-aligned objectives via LoRA adaptation. This formulation further enables a dual-expert sampling strategy: a fidelity expert provides a high-fidelity initialization, e.g., PSNR 33.69 dB, and DeblurFlow enhances perceptual quality with only a marginal fidelity reduction to 33.05 dB, whereas directly applying a generative model on top of a fidelity expert decreases PSNR to 27.60 dB. To make this practical, we further introduce r-space, a latent space tailored for residual decoding rather than image reconstruction, which reduces encoder-decoder cost by up to 9×\timesover standard VAE latents. Extensive experiments on GoPro, HIDE, RealBlur, and RWBI demonstrate that DeblurFlow achieves strong restoration fidelity and perceptual realism, while remaining computationally practical.
May 9, 2026

ElasticFlow: One-Step Physics-Consistent Policy with Elastic Time Horizons for Language-Guided Manipulation

Diffusion policies have demonstrated exceptional performance in embodied AI. However, their iterative denoising process results in high latency, and existing acceleration methods often sacrifice physical consistency. To address this, we propose ElasticFlow, a distillation-free, physics-consistent one-step policy framework. We reconstruct the Mean Field Theory by directly modeling the average velocity field, enabling a direct single-step mapping from noise to action. Addressing the Temporal Heterogeneity of robotic tasks, we introduce the Elastic Time Horizons mechanism. This mechanism effectively overcomes Spectral Bias by explicitly encoding control granularity, achieving efficient alignment between semantic instructions and physical execution horizons. Experiments on benchmarks such as LIBERO, CALVIN, and RoboTwin demonstrate that ElasticFlow achieves efficient 1-NFE inference (approximately 71Hz). Furthermore, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including OpenVLA and π0π_0, on long-horizon tasks, highlighting its potential for efficient, robust, and semantically aligned control.
May 9, 2026

Deterministic Decomposition of Stochastic Generative Dynamics

Modern generative models can be understood as probability transport from a simple base distribution to a target data distribution. Deterministic transport models offer tractable velocity-field parameterizations, whereas stochastic generative models capture richer density evolution through drift and diffusion. Yet when stochastic dynamics are described through deterministic velocity fields, the effects of drift and diffusion are often compressed into a single effective field, obscuring the distinct roles of deterministic evolution and stochastic fluctuation. In this work, we show that the deterministic field btb_t of a stochastic generative process admits a natural transport--osmotic decomposition that separates deterministic transport from stochastic, diffusion-induced effects: bt=ut+dtb_t = u_t + d_t, where utu_t governs marginal probability transport and dtd_t captures an osmotic effect induced by diffusion and determined by the marginal score. Based on this decomposition, we propose Bridge Matching, a flow-based framework for learning decomposed generative dynamics through both marginal and conditional formulations. In generative modeling experiments, we recombine the learned components as bt=ut+λddtb_t = u_t + λ_d d_t, showing that the proposed decomposition enables interpretable and controllable sampling by adjusting the osmotic contribution in probability transport.
May 9, 2026

FLUX: Geometry-Aware Longitudinal Flow Matching with Mixture of Experts

Many biological systems evolve through continuous local dynamics while switching between latent regimes defined by learning, stimulus context, internal state, or developmental stage. These processes are often observed only as unpaired longitudinal snapshots: the same cells, neurons, or animals are not tracked as matched trajectories, even though population states are sampled across successive stages. This creates two coupled challenges. First, trajectories must respect curved low-dimensional manifolds embedded in high-dimensional biological measurements. Second, the model must identify when the transport mechanism itself changes. We introduce FLUX (FLow matching for Unpaired longitudinal data with miXture-of-experts), a geometry-aware longitudinal flow-matching framework for joint transport modeling and unsupervised regime discovery. FLUX learns a data-dependent metric from pooled labeled and unlabeled observations, uses that metric to construct geometry-aware conditional paths between adjacent marginals, and decomposes the resulting velocity field into sparse expert vector fields selected by a Straight-Through Gumbel-Softmax router. Across manifold controls, a regime-switching Lorenz system, widefield cortical calcium imaging during associative learning, and embryoid body single-cell differentiation, FLUX reconstructs longitudinal transport while recovering interpretable regime structure. Ablations show that mixture-of-experts routing alone is insufficient: FLUX without geometric learning can fit local transport but fails or weakens regime discovery when regimes are encoded in local dynamics. These results suggest that geometry-aware velocity decomposition provides a general strategy for discovering latent biological state transitions from unpaired longitudinal snapshots.
May 8, 2026

MC-RFM: Geometry-Aware Few-Shot Adaptation via Mixed-Curvature Riemannian Flow Matching

Parameter-efficient adaptation of pretrained vision models is commonly performed through linear probes, prompts, low-rank updates, or lightweight residual modules. While effective, these methods usually treat adaptation as a discrete Euclidean perturbation of frozen representations, without explicitly modeling the geometry of the task-induced feature displacement. We propose MC-RFM, a mixed-curvature Riemannian flow-matching framework for few-shot adaptation of frozen visual backbones. The key idea is to represent adapted features on a product manifold combining a hyperbolic factor, which captures hierarchy-sensitive semantic structure, and a Euclidean factor, which preserves locally discriminative visual variation. Adaptation is formulated as a task-conditioned continuous transport from frozen features to support-set prototypes, trained with a flow-matching objective and coupled to a hybrid prototype-linear classifier. The method is lightweight, backbone-agnostic, and operates entirely on cached frozen features. Across seven visual recognition benchmarks, five frozen backbones, and 1/4/16-shot regimes, MC-RFM is the best-performing method in a majority of evaluated settings, with the strongest gains on Transformer backbones and fine-grained datasets. Ablations show that the mixed-curvature head, task conditioning, adaptive branch gating, prototype shrinkage, and discriminative supervision each contribute to performance. These results suggest that few-shot adaptation benefits not only from deciding which parameters to update, but also from modeling how representations should move through a geometry matched to the structure of the downstream task.
May 8, 2026

Trajectory-Consistent Flow Matching for Robust Visuomotor Policy Learning

Flow matching policies learn continuous velocity fields that transport noise to actions, enabling fast deterministic inference for robot manipulation. However, standard training optimizes a pointwise velocity objective while inference requires numerical integration of that field -- a mismatch that causes compounding trajectory errors. We propose four complementary remedies: (1) auxiliary rectified flow velocity regression that provides uniform temporal supervision across the full time interval; (2) multi-step trajectory consistency training that supervises the integrated displacement of the velocity field over trajectory segments, directly closing the train-inference gap; (3) velocity field regularization that enforces temporal smoothness, preventing oscillations that destabilize integration; and (4) fourth-order Runge-Kutta (RK4) inference that reduces global discretization error by orders of magnitude over Euler methods. Critically, these components are not independently sufficient -- RK4 without a smooth velocity field fails, and smoothness without trajectory-level supervision still drifts, as our ablation study confirms. We further pair these with a dual-view 3D point cloud encoder using two independent PointNet encoders for complementary spatial perception. On four real-robot tasks across a Franka arm and a Boston Dynamics Spot, our method achieves 70% and 60% overall success on two long-horizon multi-phase tasks where both baselines score 0%, and reaches 100% on precision tool placement. Three MetaWorld simulation tasks confirm consistent improvements, validating that trajectory-level supervision is essential for reliable policy execution.
May 8, 2026

Generalized Wasserstein Flow Matching: Nested Couplings for Point Cloud Generation

We formulate flow matching on probability measures over probability measures. Directly from the Wasserstein-on-Wasserstein (WoW) continuity equation, we show that admissible nested outer and inner couplings induce a valid metameasure flow and non-local velocity field. Validity requires neither optimal plans nor a smooth manifold. Practically, this opens up the design space of multisample flow matching: exact Wasserstein plans are distinguished by energy and straightness, while sliced and lazy linear plans yield scalable alternatives. Point-cloud experiments, including controlled Bures-Wasserstein and Euclidean minibatch baselines, demonstrate the resulting geometry-cost trade-off.
May 8, 2026

Exploring and Exploiting Stability in Latent Flow Matching

In this work, we show that Latent Flow-Matching (LFM) models are robust to different types of perturbations, including data reduction and model capacity shrinkage. We characterize this stability by these models' tendency to generate similar outputs under identical noise seeds. We provide a perspective relating this phenomenon to flow matching theory, which indicates that this stability is inherent to the FM objective. We further exploit this stability to derive practical algorithms for more efficient training and inference. Concretely, first, we show that by training LFM models on significantly reduced datasets, performance is preserved, and in compute-constrained regimes, the model converges faster while maintaining quality. This yields multiple advantages, including savings in the training time due to faster convergence, and alleviating annotation effort when training conditional models. Second, LFM stability under architectural shrinkage gives rise to a two-model coarse-to-fine approach, one using a light-weight architecture for the first phase of the FM trajectory, and one with higher capacity for the second, thereby reducing the inference cost substantially. To determine which samples are informative, we introduce three sample-scoring criteria and evaluate them under standard metrics for generative models. Our results are thoroughly evaluated on multiple datasets, demonstrating the practical advantage of this stability, including data savings and a more than two-fold inference speedup while generating comparable outputs.