Flow Matching

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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.

Mar 30, 2026

Stepwise Credit Assignment for GRPO on Flow-Matching Models

Flow-GRPO successfully applies reinforcement learning to flow models, but uses uniform credit assignment across all steps. This ignores the temporal structure of diffusion generation: early steps determine composition and content (low-frequency structure), while late steps resolve details and textures (high-frequency details). Moreover, assigning uniform credit based solely on the final image can inadvertently reward suboptimal intermediate steps, especially when errors are corrected later in the diffusion trajectory. We propose Stepwise-Flow-GRPO, which assigns credit based on each step's reward improvement. By leveraging Tweedie's formula to obtain intermediate reward estimates and introducing gain-based advantages, our method achieves superior sample efficiency and faster convergence. We also introduce a DDIM-inspired SDE that improves reward quality while preserving stochasticity for policy gradients.

Yash Savani, Branislav Kveton, Yuchen Liu +5

Carnegie Mellon University · Adobe Research

RL for Diffusion Models Step-Level Credit Assignment in RL Flow-Based Generative Modeling Flow Matching Diffusion Sampling

Mar 30, 2026

Seen2Scene: Completing Realistic 3D Scenes with Visibility-Guided Flow

We present Seen2Scene, the first flow matching-based approach that trains directly on incomplete, real-world 3D scans for scene completion and generation. Unlike prior methods that rely on complete and hence synthetic 3D data, our approach introduces visibility-guided flow matching, which explicitly masks out unknown regions in real scans, enabling effective learning from real-world, partial observations. We represent 3D scenes using truncated signed distance field (TSDF) volumes encoded in sparse grids and employ a sparse transformer to efficiently model complex scene structures while masking unknown regions. We employ 3D layout boxes as an input conditioning signal, and our approach is flexibly adapted to various other inputs such as text or partial scans. By learning directly from real-world, incomplete 3D scans, Seen2Scene enables realistic 3D scene completion for complex, cluttered real environments. Experiments demonstrate that our model produces coherent, complete, and realistic 3D scenes, outperforming baselines in completion accuracy and generation quality.

Quan Meng, Yujin Chen, Lei Li +2

Technical University of Munich · University of Virginia

3D Scene Completion 3D Scene Generation Flow Matching

Mar 30, 2026

FlowHijack: A Dynamics-Aware Backdoor Attack on Flow-Matching Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as a cornerstone for robotics, with flow-matching policies like

π_0

showing great promise in generating smooth, continuous actions. As these models advance, their unique action generation mechanism - the vector field dynamics - presents a critical yet unexplored security vulnerability, particularly backdoor vulnerabilities. Existing backdoor attacks designed for autoregressive discretization VLAs cannot be directly applied to this new continuous dynamics. We introduce FlowHijack, the first backdoor attack framework to systematically target the underlying vector-field dynamics of flow-matching VLAs. Our method combines a novel

τ

-conditioned injection strategy, which manipulates the initial phase of the action generation, with a dynamics mimicry regularizer. Experiments demonstrate that FlowHijack achieves high attack success rates using stealthy, context-aware triggers where prior works failed. Crucially, it preserves benign task performance and, by enforcing kinematic similarity, generates malicious actions that are behaviorally indistinguishable from normal actions. Our findings reveal a significant vulnerability in continuous embodied models, highlighting the urgent need for defenses targeting the model's internal generative dynamics.

Xinyuan An, Tao Luo, Gengyun Peng +3

Zhejiang University · Huzhou Institute of Industrial Control Technology · Beijing Key Laboratory of Intelligent Space Robotic Systems Technology and Applications

Backdoor Attacks on VLA Models Vision-Language-Action Models Flow Matching

Mar 28, 2026

EFlow: Fast Few-Step Video Generator Training from Scratch via Efficient Solution Flow

Scaling video diffusion transformers is fundamentally bottlenecked by two compounding costs: the expensive quadratic complexity of attention per step, and the iterative sampling steps. In this work, we propose EFlow, an efficient few-step training framework, that tackles these bottlenecks simultaneously. To reduce sampling steps, we build on a solution-flow objective that learns a function mapping a noised state at time t to time s. Making this formulation computationally feasible and high-quality at video scale, however, demands two complementary innovations. First, we propose Gated Local-Global Attention, a token-droppable hybrid block which is efficient, expressive, and remains highly stable under aggressive random token-dropping, substantially reducing per-step compute. Second, we develop an efficient few-step training recipe. We propose Path-Drop Guided training to replace the expensive guidance target with a computationally cheap, weak path. Furthermore, we augment this with a Mean-Velocity Additivity regularizer to ensure high fidelity at extremely low step counts. Together, our EFlow enables a practical from-scratch training pipeline, achieving up to 2.5x higher training throughput over standard solution-flow, and 45.3x lower inference latency than standard iterative models with competitive performance on Kinetics and large-scale text-to-video datasets.

Dogyun Park, Yanyu Li, Sergey Tulyakov +1

Snap Inc. · Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Video Diffusion Models Diffusion Model Acceleration Diffusion Transformer Few-Step Diffusion Sampling Efficient ViTs Flow Matching

Mar 27, 2026

Unified Number-Free Text-to-Motion Generation Via Flow Matching

Generative models excel at motion synthesis for a fixed number of agents but struggle to generalize with variable agents. Based on limited, domain-specific data, existing methods employ autoregressive models to generate motion recursively, which suffer from inefficiency and error accumulation. We propose Unified Motion Flow (UMF), which consists of Pyramid Motion Flow (P-Flow) and Semi-Noise Motion Flow (S-Flow). UMF decomposes the number-free motion generation into a single-pass motion prior generation stage and multi-pass reaction generation stages. Specifically, UMF utilizes a unified latent space to bridge the distribution gap between heterogeneous motion datasets, enabling effective unified training. For motion prior generation, P-Flow operates on hierarchical resolutions conditioned on different noise levels, thereby mitigating computational overheads. For reaction generation, S-Flow learns a joint probabilistic path that adaptively performs reaction transformation and context reconstruction, alleviating error accumulation. Extensive results and user studies demonstrate UMF' s effectiveness as a generalist model for multi-person motion generation from text. Project page: https://githubhgh.github.io/umf/.

Guanhe Huang, Oya Celiktutan

King’s College London

Text-to-Motion Generation Human Motion Generation Flow-Based Generative Modeling Flow Matching

Mar 27, 2026

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.

Lanmiao Liu, Esam Ghaleb, Aslı Özyürek +1

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics · Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behaviour · Utrecht University

Multimodal Grounding Flow Matching Contrastive Flow Matching Cross-Modal Alignment Human Motion Generation Co-Speech Gesture Generation

Mar 26, 2026

DiReCT: Disentangled Regularization of Contrastive Trajectories for Physics-Refined Video Generation

Flow-matching video generators produce temporally coherent, high-fidelity outputs yet routinely violate elementary physics because their reconstruction objectives penalize per-frame deviations without distinguishing physically consistent dynamics from impossible ones. Contrastive flow matching offers a principled remedy by pushing apart velocity-field trajectories of differing conditions, but we identify a fundamental obstacle in the text-conditioned video setting: semantic-physics entanglement. Because natural-language prompts couple scene content with physical behavior, naive negative sampling draws conditions whose velocity fields largely overlap with the positive sample's, causing the contrastive gradient to directly oppose the flow-matching objective. We formalize this gradient conflict, deriving a precise alignment condition that reveals when contrastive learning helps versus harms training. Guided by this analysis, we introduce DiReCT (Disentangled Regularization of Contrastive Trajectories), a lightweight post-training framework that decomposes the contrastive signal into two complementary scales: a macro-contrastive term that draws partition-exclusive negatives from semantically distant regions for interference-free global trajectory separation, and a micro-contrastive term that constructs hard negatives sharing full scene semantics with the positive sample but differing along a single, LLM-perturbed axis of physical behavior; spanning kinematics, forces, materials, interactions, and magnitudes. A velocity-space distributional regularizer helps to prevent catastrophic forgetting of pretrained visual quality. When applied to Wan 2.1-1.3B, our method improves the physical commonsense score on VideoPhy by 16.7% and 11.3% compared to the baseline and SFT, respectively, without increasing training time.

Abolfazl Meyarian, Amin Karimi Monsefi, Rajiv Ramnath +1

Path Robotics, Columbus, OH, USA · The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA · University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

Contrastive Flow Matching Physical Consistency in Video Generation Physics-Informed Generative Modeling Video Diffusion Models Flow Matching Contrastive Learning

Mar 26, 2026

BiFM: Bidirectional Flow Matching for Few-Step Image Editing and Generation

Recent diffusion and flow matching models have demonstrated strong capabilities in image generation and editing by progressively removing noise through iterative sampling. While this enables flexible inversion for semantic-preserving edits, few-step sampling regimes suffer from poor forward process approximation, leading to degraded editing quality. Existing few-step inversion methods often rely on pretrained generators and auxiliary modules, limiting scalability and generalization across different architectures. To address these limitations, we propose BiFM (Bidirectional Flow Matching), a unified framework that jointly learns generation and inversion within a single model. BiFM directly estimates average velocity fields in both image $\to$ noise" and noise

\to

image" directions, constrained by a shared instantaneous velocity field derived from either predefined schedules or pretrained multi-step diffusion models. Additionally, BiFM introduces a novel training strategy using continuous time-interval supervision, stabilized by a bidirectional consistency objective and a lightweight time-interval embedding. This bidirectional formulation also enables one-step inversion and can integrate seamlessly into popular diffusion and flow matching backbones. Across diverse image editing and generation tasks, BiFM consistently outperforms existing few-step approaches, achieving superior performance and editability.

Yasong Dai, Zeeshan Hayder, David Ahmedt-Aristizabal +1

Australian National University, Australia · Data61-CSIRO, Australia

Flow Matching Diffusion-Based Image Generation Diffusion-Based Image Editing Diffusion Model Inversion Few-Step Diffusion Sampling

Mar 25, 2026

Flow matching on homogeneous spaces

We propose a general framework to extend Flow Matching to homogeneous spaces, i.e. quotients of Lie groups. Our approach reformulates the problem as a flow matching task on the underlying Lie group by lifting the data distributions. This strategy avoids the potentially complicated geometry of homogeneous spaces by working directly on Lie groups, which in turn enables us reduce the problem to a Euclidean flow matching task on Lie algebras. In contrast to Riemannian Flow Matching, our method eliminates the need to define and compute premetrics or geodesics, resulting in a simpler, faster, and fully intrinsic framework.

Francesco Ruscelli

Mar 25, 2026

Elucidating the Design Space of Flow Matching for Cellular Microscopy

Flow-matching generative models are increasingly used to simulate cell responses to biological perturbations. However, the design space for building such models is large and underexplored. We systematically analyse the design space of flow matching models for cell-microscopy images, finding that many popular techniques are unnecessary and can even hurt performance. We develop a simple, stable, and scalable recipe which we use to train our foundation model. We scale our model to two orders of magnitude larger than prior methods, achieving a two-fold FID and ten-fold KID improvement over prior methods. We then fine-tune our model with pre-trained molecular embeddings to achieve state-of-the-art performance simulating responses to unseen molecules. Code is available at https://github.com/valence-labs/microscopy-flow-matching

Charles Jones, Emmanuel Noutahi, Jason Hartford +1

Imperial College London · Valence Labs · University of Manchester

Flow Matching Image Generation Single-Cell Perturbation Modeling Microscopy Image Analysis

Mar 25, 2026

ChargeFlow: Flow-Matching Refinement of Charge-Conditioned Electron Densities

Accurate charge densities are central to electronic-structure theory, but computing charge-state-dependent densities with density functional theory remains too expensive for large-scale screening and defect workflows. We present ChargeFlow, a flow-matching refinement model that transforms a charge-conditioned superposition of atomic densities into the corresponding DFT electron density on the native periodic real-space grid using a 3D U-Net velocity field. Trained on 9,502 charged Materials Project-derived calculations and evaluated on an external 1,671-structure benchmark spanning perovskites, charged defects, diamond defects, metal-organic frameworks, and organic crystals, ChargeFlow is not uniformly best on every in-distribution class but is strongest on problems dominated by nonlocal charge redistribution and charge-state extrapolation, improving deformation-density error from 3.62% to 3.21% and charge- response cosine similarity from 0.571 to 0.655 relative to a ResNet baseline. The predicted densities remain chemically useful under downstream analysis, yielding successful Bader partitioning on all 1,671 benchmark structures and high-fidelity electrostatic potentials, which positions flow matching as a practical density-refinement strategy for charged materials.

Tri Minh Nguyen, Sherif Abdulkader Tawfik, Truyen Tran +1

Deakin University, Geelong, VIC 3216, Australia

Computational Materials Science Quantum Chemistry Molecular Property Prediction Density Functional Theory Flow Matching

Mar 23, 2026

Uncertainty-Aware Distribution-to-Distribution Flow Matching for Scientific Imaging

Distribution-to-distribution generative models support scientific imaging tasks ranging from modeling cellular perturbation responses to translating medical images across conditions. Trustworthy generation requires reliability, or generalization across labs, devices, and experimental conditions, and accountability, or detecting out-of-distribution cases where predictions may be unreliable. We leverage Stochastic Flow Matching (SFM), a marginal-preserving stochastic extension of flow matching for improved generalization under distribution shift. SFM augments deterministic flows with a diffusion term together with a learned score-based drift correction, retaining the learned transport marginals while modeling conditional variability. Building on this SFM framework, we introduce Bayesian Stochastic Flow Matching (BSFM) as a companion uncertainty quantification mechanism and develop AVUQ (Antithetic Variance-reduction Uncertainty Quantification) to approximately estimate epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty via sample-efficient antithetic sampling with approximate posterior inference. We further use AVUQ to yield anomaly scores for unreliable generation detection. Experiments on cellular imaging (BBBC021, JUMP) and brain fMRI (Theory of Mind) across diverse unseen scenarios show that SFM improves generalization while AVUQ provides effective uncertainty-based anomaly scores under practical sampling budgets.

Dongxia Wu, Yuhui Zhang, Serena Yeung-Levy +2

Stanford University Stanford, CA

Generative Modeling Flow Matching Uncertainty Quantification OOD Generalization OOD Detection

Mar 23, 2026

AdaEdit: Adaptive Temporal and Channel Modulation for Flow-Based Image Editing

Inversion-based image editing in flow matching models has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training-free, text-guided image manipulation. A central challenge in this paradigm is the injection dilemma: injecting source features during denoising preserves the background of the original image but simultaneously suppresses the model's ability to synthesize edited content. Existing methods address this with fixed injection strategies -- binary on/off temporal schedules, uniform spatial mixing ratios, and channel-agnostic latent perturbation -- that ignore the inherently heterogeneous nature of injection demand across both the temporal and channel dimensions. In this paper, we present AdaEdit, a training-free adaptive editing framework that resolves this dilemma through two complementary innovations. First, we propose a Progressive Injection Schedule that replaces hard binary cutoffs with continuous decay functions (sigmoid, cosine, or linear), enabling a smooth transition from source-feature preservation to target-feature generation and eliminating feature discontinuity artifacts. Second, we introduce Channel-Selective Latent Perturbation, which estimates per-channel importance based on the distributional gap between the inverted and random latents and applies differentiated perturbation strengths accordingly -- strongly perturbing edit-relevant channels while preserving structure-encoding channels. Extensive experiments on the PIE-Bench benchmark (700 images, 10 editing types) demonstrate that AdaEdit achieves an 8.7% reduction in LPIPS, a 2.6% improvement in SSIM, and a 2.3% improvement in PSNR over strong baselines, while maintaining competitive CLIP similarity. AdaEdit is fully plug-and-play and compatible with multiple ODE solvers including Euler, RF-Solver, and FireFlow. Code is available at https://github.com/leeguandong/AdaEdit

Guandong Li, Zhaobin Chu

iFLYTEK

Text-Guided Image Editing Diffusion-Based Image Editing Diffusion Model Inversion Flow Matching

Mar 23, 2026

DiT-Flow: Speech Enhancement Robust to Multiple Distortions based on Flow Matching in Latent Space and Diffusion Transformers

Recent advances in generative models, such as diffusion and flow matching, have shown strong performance in audio tasks. However, speech enhancement (SE) models are typically trained on limited datasets and evaluated under narrow conditions, limiting real-world applicability. To address this, we propose DiT-Flow, a flow matching-based SE framework built on the latent Diffusion Transformer (DiT) backbone and trained for robustness across diverse distortions, including noise, reverberation, and compression. DiT-Flow operates on compact variational auto-encoders (VAEs)-derived latent features. We validated our approach on StillSonicSet, a synthetic yet acoustically realistic dataset composed of LibriSpeech, FSD50K, FMA, and 90 Matterport3D scenes. Experiments show that DiT-Flow consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative SE models, demonstrating the effectiveness of flow matching in multi-condition speech enhancement. Despite ongoing efforts to expand synthetic data realism, a persistent bottleneck in SE is the inevitable mismatch between training and deployment conditions. By integrating LoRA with the MoE framework, we achieve both parameter-efficient and high-performance training for DiT-Flow robust to multiple distortions with using 4.9% percentage of the total parameters to obtain a better performance on five unseen distortions.

Tianyu Cao, Helin Wang, Ari Frummer +7

Johns Hopkins University · Technion Israel Institute of Technology · University of Haifa

Speech Enhancement Flow Matching Diffusion Transformer

Mar 19, 2026

Warm-Start Flow Matching for Guaranteed Fast Text/Image Generation

Current auto-regressive (AR) LLMs, diffusion-based text/image generative models, and recent flow matching (FM) algorithms are capable of generating premium quality text/image samples. However, the inference or sample generation in these models is often very time-consuming and computationally demanding, mainly due to large numbers of function evaluations corresponding to the lengths of tokens or the numbers of diffusion steps. This also necessitates heavy GPU resources, time, and electricity. In this work we propose a novel solution to reduce the sample generation time of flow matching algorithms by a guaranteed speed-up factor, without sacrificing the quality of the generated samples. Our key idea is to utilize computationally lightweight generative models whose generation time is negligible compared to that of the target AR/FM models. The draft samples from a lightweight model, whose quality is not satisfactory but fast to generate, are regarded as an initial distribution for a FM algorithm. Unlike conventional usage of FM that takes a pure noise (e.g., Gaussian or uniform) initial distribution, the draft samples are already of decent quality, so we can set the starting time to be closer to the end time rather than 0 in the pure noise FM case. This will significantly reduce the number of time steps to reach the target data distribution, and the speed-up factor is guaranteed. Our idea, dubbed {\em Warm-Start FM} or WS-FM, can essentially be seen as a {\em learning-to-refine} generative model from low-quality draft samples to high-quality samples. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the idea on some synthetic toy data as well as real-world text and image generation tasks, illustrating that our idea offers guaranteed speed-up in sample generation without sacrificing the quality of the generated samples.

Minyoung Kim

Samsung AI Center Cambridge, United Kingdom

Flow Matching Flow-Based Generative Modeling Text Generation Image Generation

Mar 19, 2026

Rethinking Vector Field Learning for Generative Segmentation

Taming diffusion models for generative segmentation has attracted increasing attention. While existing approaches primarily focus on architectural tweaks or training heuristics, there remains a limited understanding of the intrinsic mismatch between continuous flow matching objectives and discrete perception tasks. In this work, we revisit diffusion segmentation from the perspective of vector field learning. We identify two key limitations of the commonly used flow matching objective: gradient vanishing and trajectory traversing, which result in slow convergence and poor class separation. To tackle these issues, we propose a principled vector field reshaping strategy that augments the learned velocity field with a detached distance-aware correction term. This correction introduces both attractive and repulsive interactions, enhancing gradient magnitudes near centroids while preserving the original diffusion training framework. Furthermore, we design a computationally efficient, quasi-random category encoding scheme inspired by Kronecker sequences, which integrates seamlessly with an end-to-end pixel neural field framework for pixel-level semantic alignment. Extensive experiments consistently demonstrate significant improvements over vanilla flow matching approaches, substantially narrowing the performance gap between generative segmentation and strong discriminative specialists.

Chaoyang Wang, Yaobo Liang, Boci Peng +3

Peking University · Baidu

Semantic Segmentation Diffusion Models Flow Matching

Mar 19, 2026

InjectFlow: Weak Guides Strong via Orthogonal Injection for Flow Matching

Flow Matching (FM) has recently emerged as a leading approach for high-fidelity visual generation, offering a robust continuous-time alternative to ordinary differential equation (ODE) based models. However, despite their success, FM models are highly sensitive to dataset biases, which cause severe semantic degradation when generating out-of-distribution or minority-class samples. In this paper, we provide a rigorous mathematical formalization of the ``Bias Manifold'' within the FM framework. We identify that this performance drop is driven by conditional expectation smoothing, a mechanism that inevitably leads to trajectory lock-in during inference. To resolve this, we introduce InjectFlow, a novel, training-free method by injecting orthogonal semantics during the initial velocity field computation, without requiring any changes to the random seeds. This design effectively prevents the latent drift toward majority modes while maintaining high generative quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Notably, on the GenEval dataset, InjectFlow successfully fixes 75% of the prompts that standard flow matching models fail to generate correctly. Ultimately, our theoretical analysis and algorithm provide a ready-to-use solution for building more fair and robust visual foundation models.

Dayu Wang, Jiaye Yang, Weikang Li +2

Baidu Inc. · Peking University

Flow Matching Flow-Based Generative Modeling OOD Generalization

Mar 19, 2026

CAFlow: Adaptive-Depth Single-Step Flow Matching for Efficient Histopathology Super-Resolution

In digital pathology, whole-slide images routinely exceed gigapixel resolution, making computationally intensive generative super-resolution (SR) impractical for routine deployment. We introduce CAFlow, an adaptive-depth single-step flow-matching framework that routes each image tile to the shallowest network exit that preserves reconstruction quality. CAFlow performs flow matching in pixel-unshuffled rearranged space, reducing spatial computation by 16x while enabling direct inference. We show that dedicating half of training to exact t=0 samples is essential for single-step quality (-1.5 dB without it). The backbone, FlowResNet (1.90M parameters), mixes convolution and window self-attention blocks across four early exits spanning 3.1 to 13.3 GFLOPs. A lightweight exit classifier (~6K parameters) achieves 33% compute savings at only 0.12 dB cost. On multi-organ histopathology x4 SR, adaptive routing achieves 31.72 dB PSNR versus 31.84 dB at full depth, while the shallowest exit exceeds bicubic by +1.9 dB at 2.8x less compute than SwinIR-light. The method generalizes to held-out colon tissue with minimal quality loss (-0.02 dB), and at x8 upscaling it outperforms all comparable-compute baselines while remaining competitive with the much larger SwinIR-Medium model. Downstream nuclei segmentation confirms preservation of clinically relevant structure. The model trains in under 5 hours on a single GPU, and adaptive routing can reduce whole-slide inference from minutes to seconds.

Elad Yoshai, Ariel D. Yoshai, Natan T. Shaked

School of Biomedical Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Medical Image Super-Resolution Image Super-Resolution Flow Matching Early-Exit Neural Networks Whole-Slide Image Analysis

Mar 18, 2026

ProbeFlow: Training-Free Adaptive Flow Matching for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies increasingly use Flow Matching (FM) action heads to generate action chunks as continuous trajectories. At inference, an FM head solves an ordinary differential equation (ODE): starting from a prior action latent, it repeatedly queries a learned velocity field to advance the state toward the decoded action chunk. Because each query depends on the preceding state, this iterative decoding can impose substantial sequential action-head cost at deployment. We propose ProbeFlow, a training-free framework that routes each action chunk to an integration schedule using a Lookahead Consistency Probe. Optional oscillation-conditioned (OSC) threshold adaptation reuses the same velocity evaluations and can trade part of the acceleration for potentially better task performance. On MetaWorld, the fixed-threshold configuration uses 2.60 scheduled steps (2.92 action-head evaluations) and reports 15.9 ms action-head latency, versus 235.7 ms for 50-step Euler, while obtaining 83.2% success versus 82.5%. On LIBERO, it uses 4.53 scheduled steps (5.09 action-head evaluations), reports 32.7 ms, and obtains 88.7% success, compared with 278.7 ms and 92.5% for 50-step Euler. We also evaluate OSC on three real-world manipulation tasks with 50 trials per method and task. These evaluations characterize action-decoding compute-performance trade-offs without additional training.

Zhou Fang, Jiaqi Wang, Wenzhuo Li +2

School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China · Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications, Ministry of Education, China · School of Electronic Science & Engineering, Southeast University, China

Efficient VLA Model Inference Vision-Language-Action Models Flow Matching

Mar 18, 2026

Large-Scale 3D Ground-Motion Synthesis with Physics-Inspired Latent Operator Flow Matching

Earthquake hazard analysis and design of spatially distributed infrastructure, such as power grids and energy pipeline networks, require scenario-specific ground-motion time histories with realistic frequency content and spatiotemporal coherence. However, producing the large ensembles needed for uncertainty quantification with physics-based simulations is computationally intensive and impractical for engineering workflows. To address this challenge, we introduce Ground-Motion Flow (GMFlow), a physics-inspired latent operator flow matching framework that generates realistic, large-scale regional ground-motion time-histories conditioned on physical parameters. Validated on simulated earthquake scenarios in the San Francisco Bay Area, GMFlow generates spatially coherent ground motion across more than 9 million grid points in seconds, achieving a 10,000-fold speedup over the simulation workflow, which opens a path toward rapid and uncertainty-aware hazard assessment for distributed infrastructure. More broadly, GMFlow advances mesh-agnostic functional generative modeling and could potentially be extended to the synthesis of large-scale spatiotemporal physical fields in diverse scientific domains.

Yaozhong Shi, Grigorios Lavrentiadis, Konstantinos Tsalouchidis +5

Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA · School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA · Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA +2

Physics-Informed Generative Modeling Seismology Flow-Based Generative Modeling Flow Matching

Mar 17, 2026

PI-Mamba: Linear-Time Protein Backbone Generation via Spectrally Initialized Flow Matching

Motivation: Generative models for protein backbone design have to simultaneously ensure geometric validity, sampling efficiency, and scalability to long sequences. However, most existing approaches rely on iterative refinement, quadratic attention mechanisms, or post-hoc geometry correction, leading to a persistent trade-off between computational efficiency and structural fidelity. Results: We present Physics-Informed Mamba (PI-Mamba), a generative model that enforces exact local covalent geometry by construction while enabling linear-time inference. PI-Mamba integrates a differentiable constraint-enforcement operator into a flow-matching framework and couples it with a Mamba-based state-space architecture. To improve optimisation stability and backbone realism, we introduce a spectral initialization derived from the Rouse polymer model and an auxiliary cis-proline awareness head. Across benchmark tasks, PI-Mamba achieves 0.0% local geometry violations and high designability (scTM =

0.91\pm 0.03

, n = 100), while scaling to proteins exceeding 2,000 residues on a single A5000 GPU (24 GB).

Tianyu Wu, Lin Zhu

Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 600 S Mathews Ave., 61801, IL, USA · School of Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 501 E Daniel St., 61820, IL, USA

Protein Structure Generation Protein Design Molecular Generation Constrained Generative Modeling Physics-Informed Generative Modeling Mamba+1

Mar 17, 2026

FlowComposer: Composable Flows for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen attribute-object compositions by recombining primitives learned from seen pairs. Recent CZSL methods built on vision-language models (VLMs) typically adopt parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). They apply visual disentanglers for decomposition and manipulate token-level prompts or prefixes to encode compositions. However, such PEFT-based designs suffer from two fundamental limitations: (1) Implicit Composition Construction, where composition is realized only via token concatenation or branch-wise prompt tuning rather than an explicit operation in the embedding space; (2) Remained Feature Entanglement, where imperfect disentanglement leaves attribute, object, and composition features mutually contaminated. Together, these issues limit the generalization ability of current CZSL models. In this paper, we are the first to systematically study flow matching for CZSL and introduce FlowComposer, a model-agnostic framework that learns two primitive flows to transport visual features toward attribute and object text embeddings, and a learnable Composer that explicitly fuses their velocity fields into a composition flow. To exploit the inevitable residual entanglement, we further devise a leakage-guided augmentation scheme that reuses leaked features as auxiliary signals. We thoroughly evaluate FlowComposer on three public CZSL benchmarks by integrating it as a plug-and-play component into various baselines, consistently achieving significant improvements.

Zhenqi He, Lin Li, Long Chen

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Zero-Shot Learning Compositional Representation Learning Flow Matching VLM Adaptation

Mar 17, 2026

EFF-Grasp: Energy-Field Flow Matching for Physics-Aware Dexterous Grasp Generation

Denoising generative models have recently become the dominant paradigm for dexterous grasp generation, owing to their ability to model complex grasp distributions from large-scale data. However, existing diffusion-based methods typically formulate generation as a stochastic differential equation (SDE), which often requires many sequential denoising steps and introduces trajectory instability that can lead to physically infeasible grasps. In this paper, we propose EFF-Grasp, a novel Flow-Matching-based framework for physics-aware dexterous grasp generation. Specifically, we reformulate grasp synthesis as a deterministic ordinary differential equation (ODE) process, which enables efficient and stable generation through smooth probability flows. To further enforce physical feasibility, we introduce a training-free physics-aware energy guidance strategy. Our method defines an energy-guided target distribution using adapted explicit physical energy functions that capture key grasp constraints, and estimates the corresponding guidance term via a local Monte Carlo approximation during inference. In this way, EFF-Grasp dynamically steers the generation trajectory toward physically feasible regions without requiring additional physics-based training or simulation feedback. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show that EFF-Grasp achieves superior performance in grasp quality and physical feasibility, while requiring substantially fewer sampling steps than diffusion-based baselines.

Yukun Zhao, Zichen Zhong, Yongshun Gong +2

Shandong University, Jinan, China

Robotic Grasping Physics-Informed Generative Modeling Flow Matching

Mar 16, 2026

Generative Inverse Design with Abstention via Diagonal Flow Matching

Inverse design aims to find design parameters

x

achieving target performance

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{=}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.

Miguel de Campos, Werner Krebs, Hanno Gottschalk

Institute of Mathematics, TU Berlin · Siemens Energy

Flow Matching Uncertainty Quantification Flow-Based Generative Modeling Inverse Design

Mar 16, 2026

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.

Mumuksh Tayal, Manan Tayal, Ravi Prakash

Indian Institute of Science, India

Flow Matching Offline RL Safe RL Flow-Based Policy Learning

Mar 16, 2026

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.

Hainuo Wang, Mingjia Li, Xiaojie Guo

College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300350, China

Flow Matching Diffusion Transformer Image Generation Pixel-Space Diffusion Models Diffusion-Based Image Generation

Mar 16, 2026

Transition Flow Matching

Mainstream flow matching methods typically focus on learning the local velocity field, which inherently requires multiple integration steps during generation. In contrast, Mean Velocity Flow models establish a relationship between the local velocity field and the global mean velocity, enabling the latter to be learned through a mathematically grounded formulation and allowing generation to be transferred to arbitrary future time points. In this work, we propose a new paradigm that directly learns the transition flow. As a global quantity, the transition flow naturally supports generation in a single step or at arbitrary time points. Furthermore, we demonstrate the connection between our approach and Mean Velocity Flow, establishing a unified theoretical perspective. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method and support our theoretical claims.

Chenrui Ma

University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA

Flow Matching One-Step Generative Modeling Mean Flow

Mar 14, 2026

EchoLVFM: One-Step Video Generation via Latent Flow Matching for Echocardiogram Synthesis

Echocardiography is widely used for assessing cardiac function, where clinically meaningful parameters such as left-ventricular ejection fraction (EF) play a central role in diagnosis and management. Generative models capable of synthesising realistic echocardiogram videos with explicit control over such parameters are valuable for data augmentation, counterfactual analysis, and specialist training. However, existing approaches typically rely on computationally expensive multi-step sampling and aggressive temporal normalisation, limiting efficiency and applicability to heterogeneous real-world data. We introduce EchoLVFM, a one-step latent video flow-matching framework for controllable echocardiogram generation. Operating in the latent space, EchoLVFM synthesises temporally coherent videos in a single inference step, achieving a

\mathbf{\sim 50\times}

improvement in sampling efficiency compared to multi-step flow baselines while maintaining visual fidelity. The model supports global conditioning on clinical variables, demonstrated through precise control of EF, and enables reconstruction and counterfactual generation from partially observed sequences. A masked conditioning strategy further removes fixed-length constraints, allowing shorter sequences to be retained rather than discarded. We evaluate EchoLVFM on the CAMUS dataset under challenging single-frame conditioning. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate competitive video quality, strong EF adherence, and 57.9% discrimination accuracy by expert clinicians which is close to chance. These findings indicate that efficient, one-step flow matching can enable practical, controllable echocardiogram video synthesis without sacrificing fidelity. Code available at: https://github.com/EngEmmanuel/EchoLVFM

Emmanuel Oladokun, Sarina Thomas, Jurica Šprem +1

University of Oxford, Oxford, England · GE HealthCare, Cardiovascular Ultrasound R&D, Oslo, Norway

Medical Image Synthesis Controllable Video Generation Echocardiography One-Step Generative Modeling Flow Matching

Mar 14, 2026

Discriminative Flow Matching Via Local Generative Predictors

Traditional discriminative computer vision relies predominantly on static projections, mapping input features to outputs in a single computational step. Although efficient, this paradigm lacks the iterative refinement and robustness inherent in biological vision and modern generative modelling. In this paper, we propose Discriminative Flow Matching, a framework that reformulates classification and object detection as a conditional transport process. By learning a vector field that continuously transports samples from a simple noise distribution toward a task-aligned target manifold -- such as class embeddings or bounding box coordinates -- we are at the interface between generative and discriminative learning. Our method attaches multiple independent flow predictors to a shared backbone. These predictors are trained using local flow matching objectives, where gradients are computed independently for each block. We formulate this approach for standard image classification and extend it to the complex task of object detection, where targets are high-dimensional and spatially distributed. This architecture provides the flexibility to update blocks either sequentially to minimise activation memory or in parallel to suit different hardware constraints. By aggregating the predictions from these independent flow predictors, our framework enables robust, generative-inspired inference across diverse architectures, including CNNs and vision transformers.

Om Govind Jha, Manoj Bamniya, Ayon Borthakur

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal, India · Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India

Flow Matching Object Detection Image Classification Flow-Based Generative Modeling

Mar 14, 2026

FMS $^2$ : Unified Flow Matching for Segmentation and Synthesis of Thin Structures

Segmenting thin structures like infrastructure cracks and anatomical vessels is a task hampered by topology-sensitive geometry, high annotation costs, and poor generalization across domains. Existing methods address these challenges in isolation. We propose FMS

^2

, a flow-matching framework with two modules. (1) SegFlow is a 2.96M-parameter segmentation model built on a standard encoder-decoder backbone that recasts prediction as continuous image

\rightarrow

mask transport. It learns a time-indexed velocity field with a flow-matching regression loss and outputs the mask via ODE integration, rather than supervising only end-state logits. This trajectory-level supervision improves thin-structure continuity and sharpness, compared with tuned topology-aware loss baselines, without auxiliary topology heads, post-processing, or multi-term loss engineering. (2) SynFlow is a mask-conditioned mask

\rightarrow

image generator that produces pixel-aligned synthetic image-mask pairs. It injects mask geometry at multiple scales and emphasizes boundary bands via edge-aware gating, while a controllable mask generator expands sparsity, width, and branching regimes. On five crack and vessel benchmarks, SegFlow alone outperforms strong CNN, Transformer, Mamba, and generative baselines, improving the volumetric metric (mean IoU) from 0.511 to 0.599 (+17.2%) and reducing the topological metric (Betti matching error) from 82.145 to 51.524 (-37.3%). When training with limited labels, augmenting SegFlow with SynFlow-generated pairs recovers near-full performance using 25% of real annotations and improves cross-domain IoU by 0.11 on average. Unlike classical data augmentation that promotes invariance via label-preserving transforms, SynFlow provides pixel-aligned paired supervision with controllable structural shifts (e.g., sparsity, width, branching), which is particularly effective under domain shift.

Babak Asadi, Peiyang Wu, Mani Golparvar-Fard +2

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Thin-Structure Segmentation Topology-Preserving Image Segmentation Medical Image Segmentation Crack Segmentation Flow Matching Conditional Image Generation