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Path-independent Flow Matching for Multi-parameter Generative Dynamics

Machine Learning 2026-05-14 v1

Abstract

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

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.13487,
  title  = {Path-independent Flow Matching for Multi-parameter Generative Dynamics},
  author = {Francisco Téllez and AmirHossein Zamani and Philippe Martin and Shuang Ni and Guy Wolf and Eugene Belilovsky and Sina Sanjari and Yanlei Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.13487},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

12 pages including references for main part of the document, 26 pages in total when including the appendix. 15 figures in total