English

SenseFlow: Scaling Distribution Matching for Flow-based Text-to-Image Distillation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-03 v2

Abstract

The Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) has been successfully applied to text-to-image diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion (SD) 1.5. However, vanilla DMD suffers from convergence difficulties on large-scale flow-based text-to-image models, such as SD 3.5 and FLUX. In this paper, we first analyze the issues when applying vanilla DMD on large-scale models. Then, to overcome the scalability challenge, we propose implicit distribution alignment (IDA) to constrain the divergence between the generator and the fake distribution. Furthermore, we propose intra-segment guidance (ISG) to relocate the timestep denoising importance from the teacher model. With IDA alone, DMD converges for SD 3.5; employing both IDA and ISG, DMD converges for SD 3.5 and FLUX.1 dev. Together with a scaled VFM-based discriminator, our final model, dubbed \textbf{SenseFlow}, achieves superior performance in distillation for both diffusion based text-to-image models such as SDXL, and flow-matching models such as SD 3.5 Large and FLUX.1 dev. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/XingtongGe/SenseFlow}{https://github.com/XingtongGe/SenseFlow}

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.00523,
  title  = {SenseFlow: Scaling Distribution Matching for Flow-based Text-to-Image Distillation},
  author = {Xingtong Ge and Xin Zhang and Tongda Xu and Yi Zhang and Xinjie Zhang and Yan Wang and Jun Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.00523},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:52:16.732Z