Related papers: On Variance Reduction in Learning Mean Flows

Score-based distillation methods (e.g., variational score distillation) train one-step diffusion models by first pre-training a teacher score model and then distilling it into a one-step student model. However, the gradient estimator in the…

Diffusion distillation is a widely used technique to reduce the sampling cost of diffusion models, yet it often requires extensive training, and the student performance tends to be degraded. Recent studies show that incorporating a GAN…

Few-step diffusion or flow-based generative models typically distill a velocity-predicting teacher into a student that predicts a shortcut towards denoised data. This format mismatch has led to complex distillation procedures that often…

We survey continuous-time generative modeling methods based on transporting a simple reference distribution to a data distribution via stochastic or deterministic dynamics. We present a unified framework in which diffusion models,…

We introduce Midpoint Generative Models (MGM), a principled framework for training one-step generative models. MGM is based on a simple symmetry of Flow Matching with linear interpolation: when the two endpoint distributions coincide, the…

State-of-the-art text-to-image models produce high-quality images, but inference remains expensive as generation requires several sequential ODE or denoising steps. Native one-step models aim to reduce this cost by mapping noise to an image…

We present a comprehensive comparative study of three generative modeling paradigms: Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM), Conditional Flow Matching (CFM), and MeanFlow. While DDPM and CFM require iterative sampling, MeanFlow…

Diffusion policies are expressive yet incur high inference latency. Flow Matching (FM) enables one-step generation, but integrating it into Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) is challenging: the optimal policy is an…

Fast flow models accelerate the iterative sampling process by learning to directly predict ODE path integrals, enabling one-step or few-step generation. However, we argue that current fast-flow training paradigms suffer from two fundamental…

Consistency models have been proposed for fast generative modeling, achieving results competitive with diffusion and flow models. However, these methods exhibit inherent instability and limited reproducibility when training from scratch,…

Flow matching has emerged as a powerful framework for generative modeling through continuous normalizing flows. We investigate a potential topological constraint: when the prior distribution and target distribution have mismatched topology…

Mean flow (MeanFlow) enables efficient, high-fidelity image generation, yet its single-function evaluation (1-NFE) generation often cannot yield compelling results. We address this issue by introducing RMFlow, an efficient multimodal…

We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine learning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic…

Diffusion alignment aims to optimize diffusion models for the downstream objective. While existing methods based on reinforcement learning or direct backpropagation achieve considerable success in maximizing rewards, they often suffer from…

We analyze the training of a two-layer autoencoder used to parameterize a flow-based generative model for sampling from a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture. Previous work shows that the phase where the relative probability between the modes…

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…

Generating high-quality time-series data is challenging because real-world signals often exhibit multimodal patterns and multiscale dynamics, including oscillations and high-frequency variations. Flow Matching (FM) offers an efficient…

Diffusion models are commonly interpreted as learning the score function, i.e., the gradient of the log-density of noisy data. However, this assumption implies that the target of learning is a conservative vector field, which is not…

Timestep sampling $p(t)$ is a central design choice in Flow Matching models, yet common practice increasingly favors static middle-biased distributions (e.g., Logit-Normal). We show that this choice induces a speed--quality trade-off:…

Recent advances in large multi-modal generative models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multi-modal generation, including image and video generation. These models are typically built upon multi-step frameworks like diffusion and…