Latent Flow

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6 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jul 6Week of Sep 21

Latest papers 45

Sep 28, 2026cs.SD

Distill Locally, Schedule Globally: Flow Maps for Few-Step Text-to-Speech

Flow-matching text-to-speech (TTS) models achieve high synthesis quality but require many neural function evaluations (NFEs) to integrate their generative trajectories. Recent few-step flow-map distillation approaches for TTS construct targets from numerically integrated teacher trajectories, creating a trade-off between target accuracy and training cost. We propose Local Flow-Map Distillation (LFMD), which adapts Eulerian Map Distillation to conditional TTS and avoids teacher trajectory integration during target construction. For inference, we derive a sampling schedule (TD-DP) from teacher dynamics and consistency of the learned maps, with a single cost graph supporting multiple NFE budgets without external audio-metric evaluation. Because scheduling offers no flexibility at one NFE, we refine this regime with alignment-aware temporal self-distillation using soft-DTW. Across Seed-TTS and LibriSpeech-PC, LFMD improves low-NFE synthesis over a matched integral-distillation baseline. On Seed-TTS, the refined student reaches 1.80% WER with 1-NFE, compared with 1.76% for its 32-NFE teacher.

Yentl Collin, Evan Dufraisse, Amr Mohamed +3

Institute of Foundation Models (IFM), MBZUAI

Flow-Matching Text-To-Speech Latent Flow Flow Map Few-Step Generation Invariant Synthesis Schedule

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

Reasoning with Continuous Latent Diffusion

Continuous diffusion generates complete reasoning solutions through iterative refinement in latent space. We introduce the Continuous Embedding Diffusion Reasoner (CEDR), an ELF-based training and inference recipe. Our experiments show that accurate decoding alone does not ensure strong reasoning performance. We therefore learn compact representations from multiple layers of a strong autoregressive teacher. Their decomposition also enables asynchronous denoising at different rates. We show that prompt encodings need only preserve the information required for the correct text-conditional score, rather than exactly match teacher features, and use a staged curriculum to learn a compact prompt encoder that replaces the teacher Transformer at inference. We adapt DiffusionNFT to learned self-conditioning guidance and incorporate gold-solution endpoints to supplement sparse rewards. Our supervised models outperform reported results from recent continuous-diffusion baselines at comparable backbone scales on mathematical reasoning and HumanEval code generation. With a 638M-parameter denoising backbone and learned prompt conditioning, post-NFT CEDR-L achieves 63.74% pass@1 on GSM8K and 24.6% on MATH500 at 64 denoising steps, and 32.85% on HumanEval and 30.18% on HumanEval+ at 128 denoising steps. Code will be available at: https://github.com/chengxiang/CEDR.

Xiang Cheng

Duke University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Efficient Latent Reasoning Latent Flow Diffusion Models Sentence Encoders

Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

FILIGREE3D: Scaling Sparse Latent Flow Matching for Ultra-High-Resolution Image-to-3D Generation

Scaling image-to-3D generation to ultra-high resolutions requires controlling rapidly growing computational costs without sacrificing fine geometric detail. We present \textbf{Filigree3D}, a sparse latent flow-matching framework that generates 3D geometry from a single image at voxel resolutions up to

2048^3

, with straightforward extensibility to

4096^3

. To make training tractable, we introduce Structure-Aware Sparse Scaling, which combines spatial bounding with alternating local-global attention to constrain token growth while preserving both fine-scale details and long-range structural context. To enhance detail reconstruction, we curate training samples based on their high-resolution geometric gains and inject multi-scale image features into a sparse 3D DiT, effectively coupling structural semantics with fine-grained visual cues. Furthermore, a visibility-aware voxel regularization strategy improves robustness against sparse perturbations and facilitates the completion of unobserved geometry. Under our default configuration, Filigree3D maintains peak GPU memory consumption within practical limits for contemporary hardware, enabling the generation of highly intricate 3D geometry in approximately one minute. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields substantial improvements in overall geometric fidelity and fine-detail preservation compared to existing baselines, validating practical, detail-preserving 3D generation at unprecedented resolutions.

Hongjie Li, Xinran Yang, Xiuchao Wu +2

AlibabaGroup

3D Generative Models 3D Generation High-Resolution Latent Flow Diffusion Transformers

Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

MotionSpaceFlow: Representation-Aware Flow Matching in Direct Motion Space

Recent advances in diffusion and flow models have substantially improved text-driven human motion generation. Yet most methods generate in low-dimensional, temporally downsampled latent spaces learned primarily for reconstruction, a bottleneck that can limit generation quality and preclude direct manipulation of individual frames and joints. We introduce MotionSpaceFlow (MSFlow), a representation-aware flow-matching framework that predicts clean motion directly in continuous motion space without a learned encoder or decoder. To account for the anisotropic structure of direct motion representations, we propose representation-aware noise scaling and show how the initial Gaussian source scale governs the covariance of intermediate probability-path marginals. We further introduce a Representation-Aware Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (RA-MMDiT), which jointly updates token-level language and full-resolution motion features through joint attention while adapting temporal information flow to the motion representation: causal attention for incremental features defined by frame-to-frame changes, and bidirectional attention for global features such as absolute joint coordinates. Across different datasets and motion representations, MSFlow achieves state-of-the-art text-to-motion performance. Its global representation variant additionally enables zero-shot, inference-time control over any joint or frame through projection sampling without control-conditioned training, delivering leading motion quality with exact constraint satisfaction.

Qing Yu, Kent Fujiwara

LY Corporation, Tokyo, Japan

Contrastive Flow Matching Human Motion Generation Latent Flow Diffusion Transformers Motion

Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

Frozen Flows Forget: Diagnosing and Restoring Lost Motion in a Latent-flow World Model

Latent world models that integrate a flow in a frozen self supervised latent space train stably and cheaply, yet silently lose the property manipulation depends on most: motion. The pretrained flow never moves the manipulated object; retraining it with latent-only losses only trades stillness for teleport-like motion. We trace the failure to the training signal, not the representation: anchor-sparse, latent-only supervision never says where along the horizon change belongs. Decode-augmented rollout training (DART) repairs this while keeping the representation frozen, retraining only the flow with decode-path supervision. DART outperforms its latent only parent on the full protocol, restores the temporal structure of motion, and re-couples predicted motion to the scene; at larger scale it further improves prediction quality, closing nearly half the remaining gap to an oracle-informed interpolation reference. Finally, we report an unexpected finding about evaluation: pixel error alone rewards frozen predictions.

Xiwen Chen, Rigaudiere Z. Li, Zhiruo Zhou +2

Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University · Shanghai Jiaotong University · Wuhan University of Technology

Latent Flow Latent Motion Motion World Models Autoregressive Rollout

Sep 23, 2026eess.AS

UNITE-AUDIO: Joint Learning of Continuous Tokenization and Latent Flow Matching for Text-to-Audio Generation

Text-to-audio (TTA) generation aims to synthesize realistic audio that faithfully reflects natural-language descriptions. Most TTA systems adopt a two-stage latent paradigm: an audio tokenizer is optimized for reconstruction and then frozen, after which a generative model is trained in the resulting latent space. However, reconstruction-oriented representations may be suboptimal for generation, motivating joint representation and generative learning. To this end, we introduce Unite-Audio, to our knowledge, is the first to jointly learn continuous audio representations and latent flow matching for TTA. By coupling reconstruction with self-supervised generative prediction, Unite-Audio allows the generative objective to directly shape the latent space rather than treating it as a fixed intermediate representation. We further employ Flow-GRPO post-training to improve text-conditioned generation. Experiments show competitive TTA performance with a compact latent flow model, while ablation studies confirm the benefit of jointly learning the audio representation and generative model. Audio samples are available at https://runwushi.github.io/Unite-Audio.

Runwu Shi, Kai Li, Yujin Wang +8

Institute of Science Tokyo · Tsinghua University · Wuhan University +2

Modern Generative Audio Models Audio Tokenizers Audio Understanding Latent Flow

Sep 15, 2026cs.AI

Physics-Constrained Digital Twins for Sensor Integrity in Urban Pedestrian Flow: Detecting Stealthy False Data Injection with Conformal Guarantees

City pedestrian counting systems now feed economic indicators, planning decisions and safety operations, yet the twins built on top of them treat the incoming stream as ground truth. We study what happens when it is not. We formalise stealthy false data injection for city-scale pedestrian sensing, where the map from latent flow to observation is far more rank deficient than in the power and water networks for which stealth has been characterised. Our twin estimates directed flows on the pedestrian street graph, assimilates counts through a learned graph-localised gain, and is trained against a flow conservation residual that couples metered and unmetered segments. Detection combines the innovation with that residual, and the alarm threshold is set by adaptive conformal calibration rather than by hand. To measure what the physics buys, we define the attack margin, the relative reduction in worst-case corruption of the estimated flow field, achieved against a white-box adversary that optimises directly through the twin. On six years of Melbourne data the margin reaches 0.54 against a single compromised device and falls to 0.19 when a third of the fleet is compromised, on a network where only 1.18 per cent of walkable segments are metered. Replacing the street graph by a distance graph collapses it to 0.09, which shows that the gain comes from the conservation law rather than from locality.

Oscar Mogollon Gutierrez, Fatemeh Ghasemi, Mohammadhossein Homaei +2

Pedestrian Detection Urban Environments Digital Twins Latent Flow

Sep 8, 2026physics.chem-ph

Fixed-Dimensional Latent Flow for Generating Variable-Size 3D Molecules

Molecular size is coupled to composition, structure, and function, yet most 3D molecular generators require a predefined atom count. We introduce Equivariant-Free Transformer-Autoencoded Latent Flow Matching, a two-stage framework that samples a fixed-dimensional latent vector using flow matching and uses an autoregressive Transformer to determine molecular size, atom types, coordinates, and chemical attributes. Canonical atom ordering and rigid-pose alignment enable Transformers without equivariant layers, while decoded attributes guide bond reconstruction. On PCQM4Mv2, unconditional generation yields 87.9% unique, novel molecules passing sanitization and PoseBusters checks, exceeding baselines with lower end-to-end training and sampling time and higher end-to-end throughput. Across ten target HOMO-LUMO gaps, internal ranking retains 30% of screened candidates and increases the density functional theory-verified hit rate within 0.1 eV from 25.0% to 52.4%, while largely preserving novelty and diversity. These results demonstrate fixed-dimensional latent generation with autoregressive decoding as a practical approach to molecular design without prespecifying size.

Weichi Yao, Cameron Gruich, Bryan R. Goldsmith +1

Michigan Institute for Data & AI in Society University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA · Department of Chemical Engineering University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA · Department of Statistics University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Molecular Generation Molecules Latent Flow Future Latent Representations 3D Generation

Sep 7, 2026cs.CV

Latent-to-Latent Flow for Volumetric Stochastic Segmentation

Uncertainty arising from inter-observer variability in medical image segmentation plays an important role in developing treatment plans. Research in this area is inhibited by the lack of multiple annotations for large-scale medical datasets, especially for volumetric data, which suffers from additional scaling and computational complexity challenges. Flow matching has emerged as a powerful framework for generative modelling and has also been demonstrated to maintain strong performance when working with latent representations of images. In this work, we introduce a latent-to-latent flow technique for stochastic segmentation of medical volumes via encoded representations of both the image and label space. We evaluate our method on two challenging applications covering delineation uncertainty for radiotherapy planning and multiple organ structure segmentation, improving efficiency up to 14x compared with full resolution models while maintaining clinically relevant performance.

Omar Todd, Sooha Kim, Raghav Mehta +5

Imperial College London, UK · The Royal Marsden Hospital, London, UK · Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK

Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation Latent Flow Volume Radiotherapy Delineation

Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

FlowVVTON: Flow-Guided Mask-Free Video Virtual Try-On

Video virtual try-on aims to transfer a target garment onto a moving person across video frames. Current methods rely on human parsing masks or pose keypoints that frequently fail under large motions and occlusions, causing boundary artifacts and temporal inconsistency. A further limitation is that most approaches rely solely on attention mechanisms for temporal modeling, providing no explicit motion supervision. We propose FlowVVTON, a mask-free framework that eliminates parsing mask dependency entirely. Optical flow is used solely as a training-time supervision signal: a flow-warped latent loss, applied across all layers of the generation model, enforces multi-scale temporal consistency by aligning adjacent-frame features under explicit physical motion constraints. A two-stage training strategy establishes mask-free spatial alignment before introducing flow-guided temporal supervision. Experiments on TikTokDress show that FlowVVTON outperforms baselines by substantial margins, particularly in temporal consistency (5.7

\times

VFID-R improvement over SwiftTry), while requiring no segmentation masks, pose keypoints, or region annotations at any stage.

Shengyao Chen, Xianbing Sun, Liqing Zhang +1

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

Virtual Try-On Optical Flow Latent Flow

Aug 30, 2026cs.CV

GridFlow: Structured Latent Flow for Seamless City-Scale 3D Point Cloud Generation

Generating realistic 3D city environments from remote sensing data is important for simulation, urban planning, and mixed reality, yet existing point cloud generation methods are limited to single objects or bounded indoor scenes and cannot handle the scale, seamless tiling, and partial observability challenges of city-scale generation. We present \ours{}, a multi-stage framework that generates dense, colored point clouds (

10^5

points per

150\text{m}{\times}150\text{m}

tile) at city scale, conditioned on satellite imagery, semantic segmentation maps, and digital surface models (DSM). A \emph{Grid-Aligned VAE} encodes each tile into a topology-preserving latent grid where tokens correspond to fixed spatial regions, enabling spatially coherent multi-modal conditioning and compact latent-space edge consistency that implicitly aligns thousands of boundary points for seamless cross-tile generation. A conditional rectified flow model synthesizes geometry latents from the fused multi-modal conditions, and an orientation-aware diffusion colorizer separately handles satellite-visible horizontal surfaces and occluded vertical façades. To support standardized evaluation, we build on public 3D data sources to introduce \emph{City3D-MultiGen}, a benchmark of

163

K densely annotated tiles from Melbourne and London with aligned point clouds, satellite images, semantic maps, and elevation data. Experiments show that \ours{} outperforms adapted point cloud generation baselines across all geometry metrics and produces visually coherent colored point clouds with seamless boundaries over arbitrarily large urban extents. Our benchmark details are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/e32/City3D-MultiGen

Xinyu Wang, Muhammad Ibrahim, Atif Mansoor +1

The University of Western Australia, Perth, WA 6009, Australia

Point Clouds Latent Flow

Aug 29, 2026cs.LG

Flow-JEPA: Robust Latent Dynamics for JEPA World Models via Flow Matching

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provide a powerful framework for latent world modeling and planning in a reconstruction-free manner. Although numerous JEPA-based approaches have been proposed to mitigate representation collapse, our experiments on localized, out-of-distribution visual noise reveal that performance degradation remains pronounced and unresolved. We propose Flow-JEPA (F-JEPA), a flow-based latent dynamics model that jointly generates a sequence of future latent states conditioned on the current observation and actions. A Gaussian distribution serves as the flow source, exposing the vector field to perturbed latent trajectories as it learns to transport them toward clean future representations. This formulation retains the reconstruction-free JEPA framework while switching from pointwise transition regression to stochastic trajectory-level prediction. F-JEPA raises mean success from

86\%

to

92\%

under clean observations and from

67\%

to

86\%

under noisy conditions. Further evaluations over varying perturbation severity and inference settings show that the performance advantage persists across a broad range of conditions. These results suggest that conditional flow matching provides a promising alternative to deterministic autoregressive prediction as a dynamics formulation in JEPA world models.

Yanchen Huo, Ziying Song, Yadan Luo

Nanyang Technological University · The University of Queensland

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures Latent World Models S-Jepa Latent Flow Latent Dynamics Ego-Trajectory Prediction

Jul 31, 2026cs.CV

MoRAE: Flow-Friendly Self-Supervised Latents for Text-to-Motion Generation

Text-to-motion generation must produce motions that are semantically correct, temporally coherent, and physically plausible. A natural approach is to first project motion data into a structured semantic space and then train a generative model within that space. Such a paradigm has been highly successful in image generation through Representation Autoencoders (RAEs), where a frozen self-supervised encoder provides semantic features for diffusion or flow models to learn from. However, direct transfer of such a paradigm to motion space using Motion-JEPA as the frozen encoder fails dramatically. We diagnose this failure geometrically and identify two motion-specific bottlenecks: (1) the JEPA feature space is spectrally ill-conditioned, making the Gaussian-to-data transport unstable; and (2) even with a well-conditioned spectrum, flow residuals tend to align with decoder-sensitive directions, where small latent errors are amplified into large motion artifacts after decoding. Based on these insights, we propose MoRAE. MoRAE addresses the two bottlenecks separately. A compact bottleneck distills the structured JEPA representation while removing weak and redundant directions, bringing the latent spectrum into a transport-stable regime. Motion-coupled training then aligns the retained latent geometry with the decoder, making characteristic flow errors less costly after decoding. With this flow-friendly latent, a standard non-autoregressive Flow-Matching DiT achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Yifei Zhu, Mingyi Shi, Yangyang Cai +3

1Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan · 2The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Text-To-Motion Generation Latent Flow Autoencoder Architectures S-Jepa Bottlenecks

Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

Latent-Kernel Discrete Flow Maps for Few-Step Generation

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

Mansoor Ahmed, Yue-Tsz Fan, Hemanth Venkateswara +1

Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA · Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

Latent Flow Few-Step Generation Masked Diffusion Language Models Discrete Exploratory Factor Analysis

Jul 24, 2026cs.LG

LatentFlow: Visual Analytics for Latent Space Analysis in Molecular Graph Neural Networks

Chemists and materials scientists increasingly use machine learning models, such as graph neural networks (GNNs), to predict properties of molecules and the outcomes of their reactions. Beyond predictive performance, understanding how these models organize chemical information internally in their latent spaces, i.e., the embeddings of the molecules, is critical. Analyzing latent spaces helps diagnose model behavior and assess whether the learned embeddings are organized in ways that reflect meaningful chemical relationships. Unfortunately, existing methods provide limited support for analyzing latent spaces across layers and across different model states (e.g., training epochs, model configurations, and input data), making it difficult to understand how these latent spaces evolve throughout a model or relate to chemical concepts. We present LatentFlow, a visual analytics system developed in collaboration with a domain expert for analyzing latent spaces in molecular GNNs. LatentFlow groups embeddings into clusters and supports exploration of latent spaces by tracking how these clusters change across layers and model states using a modified Sankey diagram. To support interpretation, LatentFlow links these clusters to representative molecules and their shared substructures, and it allows scientists to introduce their own domain knowledge and compare it with the patterns found in the latent spaces. We evaluate LatentFlow through two case studies. The results show that LatentFlow helps scientists understand how latent spaces evolve, identify meaningful molecular patterns, and better interpret model behavior.

Shiyi Liu, Jiaqing Chen, Nicholas Hadler +6

Arizona State University · University of California, Berkeley · ICSI, LBNL, and University of California, Berkeley +2

Chemical Structures Visual Analytics Graph Neural Networks Latent Space Latent Flow Materials Science

Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

Decafs: Disentangled Conditional adversarial Flows

Flow-based models have established state-of-the-art performance in generative modeling across domains, but are hard to interpret due to their complex latent embeddings. In particular, the entanglement of generative factors in the latent space hinders controlled generation. We circumvent this issue by appealing to a novel conditional generator based on Lie groups that disentangles an alternative latent space, which is aligned closely with the latent flow space using an adversarial loss. Our approach facilitates interpretable conditional generation while obviating the need to expand the dimensionality of the flow space (owing to its invertibility requirements). The proposed model demonstrates strong performance across conditional image (including, outperforming StyleGAN on MNIST, dSprites) and molecule (using standard QM9, ZINC and MOSES) generation tasks

Anirudh jain, Sakshi Varshney, Samuel Kaski +1

Orion Pharma · Aalto University, Finland · Aalto University +3

Latent Flow Generative Models High-Fidelity Conditional Generation Adversarial Training Lie Group

Jul 20, 2026cs.AI

FlowBlock: Wavefront-Parallel Decoding for Self-Correcting Diffusion Language Models

Block-wise diffusion large language models (dLLMs) decode sequentially at the block level, enabling effective KV-cache reuse across blocks but making inter-block decoding strictly serial. Prior work has attempted to unlock inter-block parallelism through post-training methods, but achieves only modest speedups and often degrades accuracy. We observe that self-correcting dLLMs offer a training-free alternative: token-to-token (T2T) editing can repair tokens drafted with a slightly stale upstream context, so a downstream block requires only an informative draft rather than a finalized predecessor. This turns block finality from a hard dependency into a scheduling resource. We propose \textbf{\flowblock{}}, a training-free parallel decoding framework built on two mechanisms. (i) \emph{Gated Wavefront Decoding} admits blocks into a bounded wavefront only when a readiness gate is satisfied, jointly refines active blocks via T2T editing, and commits blocks in order under a windowed block-causal mask that preserves exact frozen-prefix KV caches reuse. (ii) \emph{Heterogeneous Wavefront Packing} assigns each request an independent wavefront while packing asynchronous windows into dense, shape-stable batched forwards. Across different benchmarks, \flowblock{} improves tokens per second (TPS) over LLaDA-2.1 and LLaDA-2.0, two serial block-wise dLLMs, by up to 2.95

\times

and 4.01

\times

, while reducing latency by up to 53.6% and 77.1%, respectively. It also improves average accuracy by 1.3 points. Compared with D2F, a training-based inter-block-parallel baseline, \flowblock{} achieves higher accuracy and up to 16

\times

higher batched serving throughput.

Bing Tian, Haikun Liu, Xiaocheng Zhong +5

† Huazhong University of Science and Technology · § Xiaohongshu Inc., China

Diffusion Language Models Latent Flow Diffusion Models Key-Value Cache

Jul 14, 2026stat.ML

LatentFlow: A General Framework for Conditioning Stochastic Processes

Stochastic-process models are, as a rule, far easier to simulate than to condition. Non-linear observations, non-Gaussian likelihoods, black-box information, and global constraints all induce intractable conditional laws, requiring bespoke, model-specific constructions. We introduce LatentFlow, a single framework for conditioning stochastic processes, with no learned neural approximations and no training. Our starting point is to write the stochastic process as the deterministic image of a tractable latent innovation,

f_0 = T_{\vartheta}(ξ_0)

, with

ξ_0

sampled from a simple reference distribution. This reduces process-level conditioning to latent-space inference: pull the likelihood back through

T_{\vartheta}

, sample the resulting latent law with a tractable guided probability flow, and push the samples forward. This construction is provably exact at the level of the target law; in practice, approximation enters only through finite terminal noising, Monte Carlo guidance, and time discretisation of the continuous-time dynamics, each of which is explicit and systematically reducible. As LatentFlow is training-free, conditioning reduces to solving a single reverse-time SDE. This enables conditional sampling in seconds on a single desktop CPU across model classes that have never shared a scalable method: classical spatial priors, nonlinear stochastic dynamics, mechanistic models from the physical and life sciences, stochastic PDEs, heavy-tails and extremes, point and discrete-state processes, and neural or simulator-defined processes.

Louis Sharrock, Lachlan Astfalck, Henry Moss

University College London · University of New South Wales · Lancaster University

Stochastic Processes Latent Flow Stochastic Differential Equations Stochastic

Jul 1, 2026cs.CL

Self-conditioned Flow Map Language Models via Fixed-point Flows

Self-conditioning is a core technique that enhances continuous flow-based language models, where the model learns to denoise generated text by conditioning on its own denoising estimate. While empirically successful, its performance improvements are poorly understood. Moreover, there is growing interest in the use of few-step generators based on flow maps, for which how to leverage self-conditioning is unclear. Here, we show that flow language models with self-conditioning perform a fixed-point iteration that improves generation through iterative refinement. We use this viewpoint to formulate fixed-point flows, a two-dimensional class of self-conditioned flows, where the first dimension represents the flow process and the second represents the fixed-point iteration. We show that fixed-point flows define valid flow maps, and show that they can be distilled from self-conditioned flow models by compressing both fixed-point iterations and the flow process, the former with fixed-point distillation and the latter with flow map distillation. Our resulting flow map language model, FMLM

^\star

, outperforms state-of-the-art self-conditioned models and few-step models in one- and few-step generation on OpenWebText. Code is available at https://github.com/Ugness/self-conditioned-fmlm.

Jaehoon Yoo, Wonjung Kim, Floor Eijkelboom +4

KAIST · University of Amsterdam · Carnegie Mellon University

Latent Flow Text-Conditioned Diffusion Model Probe-Logit Distillation Fixed-Point Iteration

Jun 28, 2026cs.AI

Flow Reasoning Models: Turning Flows Into Efficient Recurrent Reasoners

Structured reasoning requires making and revising interdependent decisions to reach a globally consistent solution. Existing architectures struggle with this: autoregressive models commit sequentially and cannot revise earlier decisions, while masked diffusion models often require careful decoding schemes to coordinate interdependent predictions. We introduce Flow Reasoning Models (FRMs), a novel framework for structured reasoning that adapts continuous flows over discrete structured outputs with a simple recurrent refinement mechanism. By self-conditioning a flow model on its own past outputs, we turn one-shot denoising into iterative solution refinement. This lets FRMs make and revise decisions in parallel, efficiently coordinating interdependent choices across solutions. Yet conventional self-conditioning becomes unreliable at greater recurrent depth due to exposure bias between one-step training predictions and recursively generated inference states. We address this mismatch with Fixed-Point Forcing (FPF), which trains FRMs on states produced by their own inference dynamics while preserving the standard flow-matching objective. FRMs achieve solve rates of

99.5\%

,

100.0\%

, and

99.9\%

on Sudoku-Extreme, Zebra, and Maze-Unique, respectively. On Sudoku-Extreme, FRMs achieve higher peak accuracy than the evaluated masked-diffusion and specialized reasoning baselines while remaining highly compute-efficient, matching the next-best method's

98.7\%

peak solve rate with

44\times

fewer inference FLOPs.

Alec Helbling, Andrey Bryutkin, Mauro Martino +3

1Georgia Tech · 3MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab · 4IBM Research +1

Latent Flow Large Reasoning Models Few-Step Generation Scaling Out-Of-Distribution

Jun 26, 2026cs.CV

MindFlow: Harmonizing Cognitive Semantics and Acoustic Dynamics for Facial Animation Generation in Dyadic Conversations

Generating lifelike facial animation for dyadic conversations requires reconciling high-level cognitive intent with precise low-level motor reflexes, yet existing methods fall short in the semantic understanding of dialogue context and in precise dynamic control. In this paper, we propose MindFlow, a dual-pathway generative framework inspired by the Ventral-Dorsal pathway model in neuroscience, which decouples generation into two collaborative streams, thereby harmonizing deep semantic reasoning with fine-grained control. In the Ventral module, we transform the conventional Sentence-Action approach into a novel Chunk-State approach that models raw acoustic streams as a context-aware, evolving emotional state chain, capturing subtle paralinguistic nuances and mid-utterance emotional shifts missed by sentence-level modeling. The Dorsal module features a conditional autoregressive flow matching network for high-fidelity facial motion, driven by high-frequency acoustic cues and modulated by emotion states, plus a Selective Acoustic Injector for adaptive audio gating to ensure robustness in talking-and-listening dynamics without interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MindFlow achieves superior semantic appropriateness and motion naturalness compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Hejia Chen, Haoxian Zhang, Xu He +4

Beihang University · Kling Team, Kuaishou Technology · Zhongguancun Laboratory

Facial Expression Recognition Human Motion Generation Latent Flow Acoustic

Jun 26, 2026cs.CL

Masked Language Flow Models

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

Iskander Azangulov, Kianoosh Ashouritaklimi, Leo Zhang +2

Department of Statistics, University of Oxford

Masked Diffusion Language Models Latent Flow Few-Step Generation

Jun 23, 2026cs.CL

Posterior Refinement: Fast Language Generation via Any-Order Flow Maps

Non-autoregressive generation offers a powerful paradigm for iterative refinement, allowing models to recursively critique, erase and regenerate arbitrary subsets of tokens. However, existing non-autoregressive models fail to realize this potential. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) suffer from factorization error, causing sample quality to collapse when generating multiple tokens simultaneously. Flow Map Language Models (FMLMs) circumvent this bottleneck via joint sequence transport for excellent few-step generation, but sacrifice the inference-time flexibility of MDMs. We introduce FMLM+, a framework that bridges this gap by equipping FMLM with masking-style noise schedules. While generating the full sequence in a single step, FMLM+ simultaneously scores the global consistency of each token a posteriori. We leverage this to introduce Posterior Refinement, a novel inference-time refinement strategy that enables the model to adaptively self-correct its outputs, matching the performance of discrete baselines with 32x fewer NFEs. Across diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that FMLM+ with Posterior Refinement improves the speed--quality tradeoff over both MDM and FMLM families, providing a scalable foundation for high-fidelity language modeling.

Manan Agarwal, Sheel Shah, Chanhyuk Lee +6

Carnegie Mellon University · KAIST

Masked Diffusion Language Models Autoregressive Generation Latent Flow Inference-Time Flow Map

Jun 23, 2026cs.SD

Beyond U-Net: A Latent-Representation-Aligned Skip-Free Backbone for Flow-Matching Speech Enhancement

Generative models, particularly diffusion and score-based approaches, have recently achieved strong performance in speech enhancement, but their iterative sampling process limits real-time deployment. Flow Matching offers an efficient alternative by transporting noisy speech toward clean speech through an ordinary differential equation with few function evaluations. In this work, we propose a skip-free encoder-decoder backbone for flow-matching speech enhancement, guided by Latent Representation Alignment (LRA). Instead of relying on U-Net skip connections, which may transfer noise-correlated low-level features to the decoder, the proposed model aligns its bottleneck and decoder representations with clean latent features extracted from a frozen Descript Audio Codec encoder-decoder without quantization. This codec-aligned supervision promotes compact clean-speech representations while preserving efficient few-step inference. Experiments on WSJ0-CHiME3 and VoiceBank-DEMAND show improved PESQ and perceptual quality, especially on VoiceBank-DEMAND, using only five function evaluations.

Wangyi Pu, Michele Scarpiniti

Department of Information Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Speech Enhancement Latent Flow Latent Representation Alignment U-Net

Jun 18, 2026cs.LG

Understanding Latent Flow Models for Tabular Data Synthesis: Targets, Paths, and Sampling

Synthetic tabular data enables microdata sharing in regulated domains, yet deploying continuous-time generative models requires balancing analytical utility, disclosure risk, and computational cost. Latent-space flow models are flexible, but theoretical equivalences across learning targets, probability paths, and sampling dynamics can translate into different behaviour under finite-step integration and explicit compute budgets. We present an empirical study of tabular latent flow models across seven datasets, evaluating velocity, score, noise, and posterior matching objectives under optimal transport (OT) and variance-preserving (VP) paths, ODE and SDE sampling, and varying integration budgets. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we show that the learning target largely determines the utility-risk operating regime, with velocity and posterior matching tending to yield higher utility, while score and noise matching tend to achieve lower disclosure risk; (2) we demonstrate that configuration and sampling choices shift performance, with midpoint often improving distributional fidelity and OT paths often tolerating earlier stopping than VP, enabling compute savings under fixed budgets or risk thresholds; and (3) we distil these findings into actionable defaults and practical configuration guidance to support pre-release model selection under disclosure risk and resource constraints. The code implementation and supplementary materials can be accessed in https://github.com/rulnasution/tabular-latent-flow/.

Bahrul Ilmi Nasution

Department of Social Statistics, The University of Manchester, UK

Synthetic Tabular Data Latent Flow Tabular Data Distributional Fidelity Disclosures Token Budget Allocation+2

Jun 8, 2026cs.SD

Inside the Latent Flow: Causal Deciphering of Attention Dynamics in Audio Separation Foundation Models

Flow-matching transformers achieve strong audio separation, yet their attention dynamics are opaque. We adapt established causal-intervention principles into a deterministic, inference-time probing protocol for SAM Audio. Orthogonal probing uncovers a dual-pathway text-conditioning mechanism: additive injections control semantic identity, while cross-attention refines acoustic structure. We observe an asynchronous layerwise convergence: stable layers build temporal scaffolds early, whereas fast layers continue resolving artifacts during sampling. The model also attenuates temporal segmentation cues to maintain continuous-flow stability. Using these insights, we propose Layer-Selective Attention Caching (LSAC), a training-free acceleration method that caches attention in stable layers. Across acoustic complexities, LSAC cuts self-attention computation by about ~25% with negligible quality loss and yields up to 6.7x higher quality retention than naive step reduction.

Yuxuan Chen, Haoyuan Yu, Peize He

Jilin University · Hunan University · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Speech Separation Audio Understanding Latent Flow Segment Anything Model Causal Intervention

Jun 8, 2026cs.CV

Temporally Consistent and Controllable Video Generation of 2D Cine CMR via Latent Space Motion Modeling

Cine cardiac magnetic resonance is the gold standard for assessing cardiac function, but the scarcity of public datasets limits the development of advanced data-driven models. To address this limitation, we propose a generative method for synthesizing temporally coherent and anatomically consistent cardiac sequences. Our text-to-video framework decouples cardiac spatial structure from temporal motion. First, a fine-tuned diffusion model synthesizes an initial frame from a clinical text prompt, controlling anatomical features. Then, a latent flow model conditioned on a cardiac phase embedding generates the complete cardiac motion, ensuring spatial consistency and temporal control. Our model generates anatomically and pathologically diverse sequences with high temporal coherence and strong fidelity to input prompts, achieving a FID of 31.68 for image realism and a CLIP score of 31.04 for text-image alignment. These experimental results highlight its potential to produce high-fidelity, on-demand medical data, offering a scalable solution to data scarcity.

Yiheng Cao, Gustavo Andrade-Miranda, Jiatian Zhang +2

SyCoIA - IMT Mines Alès · Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou, China · SyCoIA, IMT Mines Ales, Ales, France

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Medical Image Generation Cardiac Motion Text-To-Video Generation Model Latent Flow Latent Motion+1

Jun 8, 2026cs.CL

EmoInstruct-TTS: Dual-Path Instruction-Guided Emotional Speech Synthesis

Instruction-based controllable speech synthesis enables users to specify emotions through natural language. However, existing approaches often rely on coarse emotion labels and lack explicit modeling of fine-grained intensity. We propose EmoInstruct-TTS, a dual-path instruction-guided framework for emotional speech synthesis. We introduce Emotion2embed, a supervised semantic-acoustic emotion embedding covering 48 emotional states, including fine-grained categories and intensity levels. To infer embeddings from free-form instructions, we design an Instruction-Conditioned Emotion Flow Model (ICE-Flow) that generates acoustically grounded emotion representations. The inferred embeddings are integrated into an LLM-based synthesis pipeline to provide explicit emotional control while preserving semantic planning. Experiments show improved emotional controllability and speech naturalness over strong baselines.

Minghui Wu, Ganjun Liu, Zikun Fang +6

University of Science and Technology of China, China · iFLYTEK Research, China · Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., China

Speech Synthesis Emotion F5-Tts Latent Flow Dual-Path Network

Jun 3, 2026cs.SD

SURF: Separation via Unsupervised Remixing Flow

The goal of single-channel source separation is to reconstruct

K

sources given their mixture. In supervised settings where vast amounts of clean source data are available, this challenging, ill-posed problem has been addressed successfully by generative diffusion and flow-based prior models. However, access to such clean source samples is often limited, and even when available, supervised models are vulnerable to domain shifts. To bridge this gap, we present Separation via Unsupervised Remixing Flow (SURF), an unsupervised flow matching approach for source separation that learns directly from observed mixtures. This method relies on a novel combination of state-of-the-art supervised flow matching and regression-based self-supervised techniques. At a high level, starting from a teacher model, we utilize a "remixing" step to bootstrap the learning of a student flow model from the teacher's estimates. We provide insights into the objectives optimized by this approach and draw a novel connection to the Wake-Sleep algorithm. Empirical evaluations on image and audio benchmarks demonstrate that SURF establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing unsupervised methods. See our demo page for examples. https://google.github.io/df-conformer/surf/

Henry Li, Robin Scheibler, Efthymios Tzinis +3

Google · Google DeepMind

Speech Separation Contrastive Flow Matching Separation Signal Reconstruction Latent Flow Mix+1

May 29, 2026cs.CV

Equivariant Latent Alignment via Flow Matching under Group Symmetries

Geometry-aware generative models and novel view synthesis approaches have shown strong potential in visual fidelity and consistency. In parallel, equivariant representation learning has emerged as a powerful framework for constructing latent spaces where analytically known group transformations could act directly, capturing geometric structure in data and enhancing both interpretability and generalization in novel view synthesis. However, we identify that existing approaches often suffer from latent misalignment, a discrepancy between the intended group action and the actually required transformations in the latent space. Consequently, the learned latents often fail to consistently preserve the equivariant relations imposed by the underlying group symmetry. To address this, we propose Residual Latent Flow, a flow-based framework that corrects the misaligned latents, thereby improving compliance with the underlying equivariance relation. Our comprehensive experiments show that our method significantly reduces latent misalignment and improves novel view synthesis quality, under rotation groups SO(n).

Sunghyun Kim, Jaehoon Hahm, Jeongwoo Shin +1

1Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA

Discriminative Congruence Transform Latent Flow Latent Representation Alignment Novel View Synthesis Equivariant Learning Geometry-Aware+2

May 19, 2026cs.LG

Latent Cache Flow: Model-to-Model Communication Without Text

LLM agents today communicate via text, which incurs considerable latency and information loss due to the need to autoregressively decode the sharer model's state and encode at the receiver model. Recent work such as Cache-to-Cache (C2C; Fu et al., 2026) seeks to exchange KV caches by learning adapters that translate sharer KV matrices to the receiver model. However, the adapters are large and expensive to train, and translate individual tokens, which requires the target context to be identical. This is unsuitable for agent communication, where the LLMs have differing context. We introduce Latent Cache Flow (LCF). To address efficiency, we observe that keys and values can be jointly translated and compressed, reducing the adapter to about 4% of C2C's size. To address differing context, we design the adapter to transmit a summary of new information that the target model does not have. Our early experiments show that a pruned 13 MB LCF adapter can be more accurate than C2C at 956 MB in shared-context settings; for different contexts, LCF improves F1 by 7.5% and Exact Match by 23% while 8.5 times faster than text-based communication.

Maximillian Rossi, Prajwal Raghunath, Eugene Wu

Columbia University

Large Language Model Agents Latent Flow Shared Control Text Analysis and Detection

May 13, 2026cs.LG

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.

Iskander Azangulov, Leo Zhang

Department of Statistics, University of Oxford

Latent Flow Diffusion Language Models Conditional Flow Matching Diffusion Sampling Diffusion Models Missing Bridge

May 13, 2026cs.CV

Asymmetric Flow Models

Flow-based generation in high-dimensional 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 without changing the network architecture or training/sampling procedures. On ImageNet 256

\times

256, 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.

Hansheng Chen, Jan Ackermann, Minseo Kim +2

Stanford University

Latent Flow Flow Models Velocity Field

May 11, 2026cs.LG

Language Modeling with Hyperspherical Flows

Discrete Diffusion Language Models progressed rapidly as an alternative to autoregressive (AR) models, motivated by their parallel generation abilities. However, for tractability, discrete diffusion models sample from a factorized distribution, which is less expressive than AR. Recent Flow Language Models (FLMs) apply continuous flows to language, transporting noise to data with a deterministic ODE that avoids factorized sampling. FLMs operate on one-hot vectors whose dimension scales with the vocabulary size, making FLMs costly to train. Moreover, since all distinct one-hot embeddings are equidistant in

\ell_2

, adding Gaussian noise does not have a clear semantic interpretation (unlike images, where Gaussian noise progressively degrades structure). We introduce

\mathbb{S}

-FLM, a latent FLM in the hypersphere.

\mathbb{S}

-FLM generates sequences by rotating vectors in

\mathbb{S}^{d-1}

along a velocity field learned with cross-entropy, avoiding the overhead of materializing one-hot vectors. Previous FLMs match AR in Generative Perplexity (Gen.\ PPL), but samples with high likelihood are not necessarily correct in verifiable domains such as math and code.

\mathbb{S}

-FLM substantially improves continuous flow language models on large-vocabulary reasoning and closes the gap to masked diffusion under standard-temperature sampling (

T=1

), while a gap remains under optimized low-temperature (

T=0.1

) decoding.

Justin Deschenaux, Caglar Gulcehre

EPFL · Lausanne, Switzerland · EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland +1

Diffusion Language Models Latent Flow Language Modeling Invertible Flows

May 11, 2026cs.CL

ELF: Embedded Language Flows

Diffusion and flow-based models have become the de facto approaches for generating continuous data, e.g., in domains such as images and videos. Their success has attracted growing interest in applying them to language modeling. Unlike their image-domain counterparts, today's leading diffusion language models (DLMs) primarily operate over discrete tokens. In this paper, we show that continuous DLMs can be made effective with minimal adaptation to the discrete domain. We propose Embedded Language Flows (ELF), a class of diffusion models in continuous embedding space based on continuous-time Flow Matching. Unlike existing DLMs, ELF predominantly stays within the continuous embedding space until the final time step, where it maps to discrete tokens using a shared-weight network. This formulation makes it straightforward to adapt established techniques from image-domain diffusion models, e.g., classifier-free guidance (CFG). Experiments show that ELF substantially outperforms leading discrete and continuous DLMs, achieving better generation quality with fewer sampling steps. These results suggest that ELF offers a promising path toward effective continuous DLMs.

Keya Hu, Linlu Qiu, Yiyang Lu +5

MIT

Diffusion Language Models Latent Flow Language Modeling

May 10, 2026cs.LG

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\!=\!0.94

, 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.

Juanwu Lu, Ziran Wang

Purdue University

Latent Flow Velocity Field Variance Reduction Variance Generative Models

May 8, 2026cs.LG

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.

Rania Briq, Michael Kamp, Ohad Fried +2

Forschungszentrum Jülich · Technical University Dortmund · Lamarr Institute +4

Latent Flow Generative Models Lateral String Stability Capacity Exploration

May 8, 2026cs.LG

Scaling Categorical Flow Maps

Continuous diffusion and flow matching models could represent a powerful alternative to autoregressive approaches for language modelling (LM), as they unlock a host of advantages currently reserved for continuous modalities, including accelerated sampling and tilting. Recently, several works have demonstrated the possibility of generating discrete data continuously by a simple flow matching process between a Gaussian and the one-hot encoded data distribution. They have further shown the feasibility of accelerated sampling via Categorical Flow Maps (CFMs), resulting in competitive sample quality in the few-step regime. However, this method had only been evaluated at relatively modest scales (

<1

B), leaving the question of its scalability completely open. In this article, we train a

1.7

B-parameter base flow model on

2.1

T tokens and self-distill it into a CFM that generates diverse, high-quality text in as few as

4

inference steps while maintaining near-data-level token entropy. Furthermore, we introduce a likelihood bound for CFMs in the semi-discrete setting, and show that they can be used to score the model on standard LM benchmarks, achieving results in the same range as discrete diffusion methods. Finally, we uncover some of the challenges that arise from training these models at scale, and we provide prescriptive insights on loss weighting and time scheduling.

Oscar Davis, Anastasiia Filippova, Pierre Ablin +4

Apple · University of Oxford

Latent Flow Flow Map Diffusion Language Models Diffusion Models Accelerated Sampling Token-Level Entropy+1

Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

CoreFlow: Low-Rank Matrix Generative Models

Learning matrix-valued distributions from high-dimensional and possibly incomplete training data is challenging: ambient-space generative modeling is computationally expensive and statistically fragile when the matrix dimension is large but the sample size is limited. We propose CoreFlow, a geometry-preserving low-rank flow model that learns shared row/column subspaces across the matrix distribution, and then trains a continuous normalizing flow only on the induced low-dimensional core. CoreFlow is designed for settings where shared low-rank matrix geometry is present, especially in high-dimensional limited-sample regimes. This separates shared matrix geometry from sample-specific variation, preserves matrix structure, and substantially improves training efficiency. The same framework also handles incomplete training matrices through masked Riemannian updates and iterative completion. Across real and synthetic benchmarks, CoreFlow substantially improves spectral and moment-level generation quality in few-sample regimes while remaining competitive in data-rich settings, even under compression to 9% of the ambient dimension and with up to 40% missing training entries.

Dongze Wu, Linglingzhi Zhu, Yao Xie

H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

Latent Flow Generative Models Training-Inference Mismatch

Apr 21, 2026cs.LG

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

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

Weitao Du

DAMO Academy

Latent Flow Frequency Optical Flow Wavelets Guidance

Apr 19, 2026cs.LG

FLARE: Task-agnostic embedding model evaluation through a normalization process

When task-specific labels are not available, it becomes difficult to select an embedding model for a specific target corpus. Existing labelless measures based on kernel estimators or Gaussian mixes fail in high-dimensional space, resulting in unstable rankings. We propose a flow-based labelless representation embedding evaluation (FLARE), which utilizes normalized streams to estimate information sufficiency directly from log-likelihood and avoid distance-based density estimation. We give a finite sample boundary, indicating that the estimation error depends on the intrinsic dimension of the data manifold rather than the original embedding dimension. On 11 datasets and 8 embedders, FLARE reached Spearman's

ρ

of 0.90 under the supervised benchmark and remained stable in high-dimensional embeddings (

d \geq 3{,}584

) as the existing labelless baseline collapsed.

Jingzhou Jiang, Yixuan Tang, Yi Yang +1

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Model Evaluation Latent Flow Density Ratio Estimation Normalization

Apr 17, 2026cs.LG

Neuro-Symbolic ODE Discovery with Latent Grammar Flow

Understanding natural and engineered systems often relies on symbolic formulations, such as differential equations, which provide interpretability and transferability beyond black-box models. We introduce Latent Grammar Flow (LGF), a neuro-symbolic generative framework for discovering ordinary differential equations from data. LGF embeds equations as grammar-based representations into a discrete latent space and forces semantically similar equations to be positioned closer together with a behavioural loss. Then, a discrete flow model guides the sampling process to recursively generate candidate equations that best fit the observed data. Domain knowledge and constraints, such as stability, can be either embedded into the rules or used as conditional predictors.

Karin Yu, Eleni Chatzi, Georgios Kissas

Institute of Structural Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · ETH AI Center, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · Swiss Data Science Center, Zurich, Switzerland

Neuro-Symbolic Framework Latent Flow Flow Models Discovery

Apr 16, 2026cs.AI

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

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

40\times

speedup over AR baselines and up to a

10^3\times

speedup over diffusion language models, demonstrating substantial efficiency advantages for language modeling.

Aihua Li

Duke University

Diffusion Language Models Latent Flow LLM Inference Optimization Generative Models

Apr 10, 2026cs.SD

LatentFlowSR: High-Fidelity Audio Super-Resolution via Noise-Robust Latent Flow Matching

Audio super-resolution aims to recover missing high-frequency details from bandwidth-limited low-resolution audio, thereby improving the naturalness and perceptual quality of the reconstructed signal. However, most existing methods directly operate in the waveform or time-frequency domain, which not only involves high-dimensional generation spaces but is also largely limited to speech tasks, leaving substantial room for improvement on more complex audio types such as sound effects and music. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce LatentFlowSR, a new audio super-resolution approach that leverages conditional flow matching (CFM) within a latent representation space. Specifically, we first train a noise-robust autoencoder, which encodes low-resolution audio into a continuous latent space. Conditioned on the low-resolution latent representation, a CFM mechanism progressively generates the corresponding high-resolution latent representation from a Gaussian prior with a one-step ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver. The resulting high-resolution latent representation is then decoded by the pretrained autoencoder to reconstruct the high-resolution audio. Experimental results demonstrate that LatentFlowSR achieves competitive or superior performance compared with baseline methods across various audio types and super-resolution settings. These results indicate that the proposed method possesses strong high-frequency reconstruction capability and robust generalization performance, providing compelling evidence for the effectiveness of latent-space modeling in audio super-resolution. All relevant code will be made publicly available upon completion of the paper review process.

Fei Liu, Yang Ai, Hui-Peng Du +2

National Engineering Research Center of Speech and Language Information Processing, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230027, China

Real-World Image Super-Resolution Latent Flow Time-Frequency

Jan 30, 2026cs.RO

CoLA-Flow Policy: Temporally Coherent Imitation Learning via Continuous Latent Action Flow Matching for Robotic Manipulation

Learning long-horizon robotic manipulation requires jointly achieving expressive behavior modeling, real-time inference, and stable execution, which remains challenging for existing generative policies. Diffusion-based approaches offer strong modeling capacity but incur high inference latency, while flow matching enables fast, near-single-step generation yet often suffers from unstable execution when operating directly in the raw action space. We propose Continuous Latent Action Flow Policy (CoLA-Flow Policy), a trajectory-level imitation learning framework that performs flow matching in a continuous latent action space. By encoding action sequences into temporally coherent latent trajectories and learning an explicit latent-space flow, CoLA-Flow Policy decouples global motion structure from low-level control noise, enabling smooth and reliable long-horizon execution. The framework further integrates geometry-aware point cloud conditioning and execution-time multimodal modulation, using visual cues as a representative modality to enhance real-world robustness. Experiments in simulation and on real robots show that CoLA-Flow Policy achieves near-single-step inference, improves trajectory smoothness by up to 93.7% and task success by up to 25 percentage points over raw action-space flow baselines, while remaining significantly faster than diffusion-based policies.

Wu Songwei, Jiang Zhiduo, Sun Wandong +4

Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China · Honor Device Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China

Temporally Coherent Imitation Learning Flow Policies Multimodal Action Distributions Robotic Manipulation Latent Flow