English

Latent Iterative Refinement Flow: A Geometric Constrained Approach for Few-Shot Generation

Machine Learning 2026-02-02 v2

Abstract

Diffusion and flow-matching models trained with limited data often tend to memorize the training data instead of generalization, leading to severely reduced diversity. In this paper, we provide a dynamical perspective and identify this ``collapse-to-memorization'' phenomenon as a consequence of the \emph{velocity field collapse}, where the learned field degenerates into isolated point attractors and trap the sampling trajectories. Inspired by this novel view, we introduce \textbf{{\BLUE L}atent {\BLUE I}terative {\BLUE R}efinement {\BLUE F}low ({\BLUE LIRF})}, a geometry-aware framework for from-scratch training of diffusion models in the limited-data regime. By exploiting the intrinsic geometry of a semantically aligned latent space, LIRF progressively densifies the training data manifold via a \emph{generation--correction--augmentation} closed loop, thereby effectively resolving the velocity field collapse. Theoretical guarantee on the convergence of this manifold densification procedure is also provided. Experiments on FFHQ subsets and Low-Shot datasets demonstrate the advantageous performance of LIRF over existing diffusion models for limited-data generation, achieving significantly higher diversity and recall, with comparably good generative performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.19903,
  title  = {Latent Iterative Refinement Flow: A Geometric Constrained Approach for Few-Shot Generation},
  author = {Songtao Li and Tianqi Hou and Zhenyu Liao and Ting Gao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.19903},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:53:47.453Z