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SubscribeDiff2Flow: Training Flow Matching Models via Diffusion Model Alignment
Diffusion models have revolutionized generative tasks through high-fidelity outputs, yet flow matching (FM) offers faster inference and empirical performance gains. However, current foundation FM models are computationally prohibitive for finetuning, while diffusion models like Stable Diffusion benefit from efficient architectures and ecosystem support. This work addresses the critical challenge of efficiently transferring knowledge from pre-trained diffusion models to flow matching. We propose Diff2Flow, a novel framework that systematically bridges diffusion and FM paradigms by rescaling timesteps, aligning interpolants, and deriving FM-compatible velocity fields from diffusion predictions. This alignment enables direct and efficient FM finetuning of diffusion priors with no extra computation overhead. Our experiments demonstrate that Diff2Flow outperforms na\"ive FM and diffusion finetuning particularly under parameter-efficient constraints, while achieving superior or competitive performance across diverse downstream tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods. We will release our code at https://github.com/CompVis/diff2flow.
Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL
We propose Flow-GRPO, the first method integrating online reinforcement learning (RL) into flow matching models. Our approach uses two key strategies: (1) an ODE-to-SDE conversion that transforms a deterministic Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) into an equivalent Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) that matches the original model's marginal distribution at all timesteps, enabling statistical sampling for RL exploration; and (2) a Denoising Reduction strategy that reduces training denoising steps while retaining the original inference timestep number, significantly improving sampling efficiency without performance degradation. Empirically, Flow-GRPO is effective across multiple text-to-image tasks. For complex compositions, RL-tuned SD3.5 generates nearly perfect object counts, spatial relations, and fine-grained attributes, boosting GenEval accuracy from 63% to 95%. In visual text rendering, its accuracy improves from 59% to 92%, significantly enhancing text generation. Flow-GRPO also achieves substantial gains in human preference alignment. Notably, little to no reward hacking occurred, meaning rewards did not increase at the cost of image quality or diversity, and both remained stable in our experiments.
Decoupled MeanFlow: Turning Flow Models into Flow Maps for Accelerated Sampling
Denoising generative models, such as diffusion and flow-based models, produce high-quality samples but require many denoising steps due to discretization error. Flow maps, which estimate the average velocity between timesteps, mitigate this error and enable faster sampling. However, their training typically demands architectural changes that limit compatibility with pretrained flow models. We introduce Decoupled MeanFlow, a simple decoding strategy that converts flow models into flow map models without architectural modifications. Our method conditions the final blocks of diffusion transformers on the subsequent timestep, allowing pretrained flow models to be directly repurposed as flow maps. Combined with enhanced training techniques, this design enables high-quality generation in as few as 1 to 4 steps. Notably, we find that training flow models and subsequently converting them is more efficient and effective than training flow maps from scratch. On ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512, our models attain 1-step FID of 2.16 and 2.12, respectively, surpassing prior art by a large margin. Furthermore, we achieve FID of 1.51 and 1.68 when increasing the steps to 4, which nearly matches the performance of flow models while delivering over 100x faster inference.
Align Your Flow: Scaling Continuous-Time Flow Map Distillation
Diffusion- and flow-based models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative modeling approaches, but they require many sampling steps. Consistency models can distill these models into efficient one-step generators; however, unlike flow- and diffusion-based methods, their performance inevitably degrades when increasing the number of steps, which we show both analytically and empirically. Flow maps generalize these approaches by connecting any two noise levels in a single step and remain effective across all step counts. In this paper, we introduce two new continuous-time objectives for training flow maps, along with additional novel training techniques, generalizing existing consistency and flow matching objectives. We further demonstrate that autoguidance can improve performance, using a low-quality model for guidance during distillation, and an additional boost can be achieved by adversarial finetuning, with minimal loss in sample diversity. We extensively validate our flow map models, called Align Your Flow, on challenging image generation benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art few-step generation performance on both ImageNet 64x64 and 512x512, using small and efficient neural networks. Finally, we show text-to-image flow map models that outperform all existing non-adversarially trained few-step samplers in text-conditioned synthesis.
$π_\texttt{RL}$: Online RL Fine-tuning for Flow-based Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to understand and perform complex tasks from multimodal input. Although recent work explores using reinforcement learning (RL) to automate the laborious data collection process in scaling supervised fine-tuning (SFT), applying large-scale RL to flow-based VLAs (e.g., pi_0, pi_{0.5}) remains challenging due to intractable action log-likelihoods from iterative denoising. We address this challenge with pi_{RL}, an open-source framework for training flow-based VLAs in parallel simulation. pi_{RL} implements two RL algorithms: (1) {Flow-Noise} models the denoising process as a discrete-time MDP with a learnable noise network for exact log-likelihood computation. (2) {Flow-SDE} integrates denoising with agent-environment interaction, formulating a two-layer MDP that employs ODE-to-SDE conversion for efficient RL exploration. We evaluate pi_{RL} on LIBERO and ManiSkill benchmarks. On LIBERO, pi_{RL} boosts few-shot SFT models pi_0 and pi_{0.5} from 57.6% to 97.6% and from 77.1% to 98.3%, respectively. In ManiSkill, we train pi_{RL} in 320 parallel environments, improving pi_0 from 41.6% to 85.7% and pi_{0.5} from 40.0% to 84.8% across 4352 pick-and-place tasks, demonstrating scalable multitask RL under heterogeneous simulation. Overall, pi_{RL} achieves significant performance gains and stronger generalization over SFT-models, validating the effectiveness of online RL for flow-based VLAs.
Learning Energy Decompositions for Partial Inference of GFlowNets
This paper studies generative flow networks (GFlowNets) to sample objects from the Boltzmann energy distribution via a sequence of actions. In particular, we focus on improving GFlowNet with partial inference: training flow functions with the evaluation of the intermediate states or transitions. To this end, the recently developed forward-looking GFlowNet reparameterizes the flow functions based on evaluating the energy of intermediate states. However, such an evaluation of intermediate energies may (i) be too expensive or impossible to evaluate and (ii) even provide misleading training signals under large energy fluctuations along the sequence of actions. To resolve this issue, we propose learning energy decompositions for GFlowNets (LED-GFN). Our main idea is to (i) decompose the energy of an object into learnable potential functions defined on state transitions and (ii) reparameterize the flow functions using the potential functions. In particular, to produce informative local credits, we propose to regularize the potential to change smoothly over the sequence of actions. It is also noteworthy that training GFlowNet with our learned potential can preserve the optimal policy. We empirically verify the superiority of LED-GFN in five problems including the generation of unstructured and maximum independent sets, molecular graphs, and RNA sequences.
BRIDGES: Bridging Graph Modality and Large Language Models within EDA Tasks
While many EDA tasks already involve graph-based data, existing LLMs in EDA primarily either represent graphs as sequential text, or simply ignore graph-structured data that might be beneficial like dataflow graphs of RTL code. Recent studies have found that LLM performance suffers when graphs are represented as sequential text, and using additional graph information significantly boosts performance. To address these challenges, we introduce BRIDGES, a framework designed to incorporate graph modality into LLMs for EDA tasks. BRIDGES integrates an automated data generation workflow, a solution that combines graph modality with LLM, and a comprehensive evaluation suite. First, we establish an LLM-driven workflow to generate RTL and netlist-level data, converting them into dataflow and netlist graphs with function descriptions. This workflow yields a large-scale dataset comprising over 500,000 graph instances and more than 1.5 billion tokens. Second, we propose a lightweight cross-modal projector that encodes graph representations into text-compatible prompts, enabling LLMs to effectively utilize graph data without architectural modifications. Experimental results demonstrate 2x to 10x improvements across multiple tasks compared to text-only baselines, including accuracy in design retrieval, type prediction and perplexity in function description, with negligible computational overhead (<1% model weights increase and <30% additional runtime overhead). Even without additional LLM finetuning, our results outperform text-only by a large margin. We plan to release BRIDGES, including the dataset, models, and training flow.
Training Normalizing Flows from Dependent Data
Normalizing flows are powerful non-parametric statistical models that function as a hybrid between density estimators and generative models. Current learning algorithms for normalizing flows assume that data points are sampled independently, an assumption that is frequently violated in practice, which may lead to erroneous density estimation and data generation. We propose a likelihood objective of normalizing flows incorporating dependencies between the data points, for which we derive a flexible and efficient learning algorithm suitable for different dependency structures. We show that respecting dependencies between observations can improve empirical results on both synthetic and real-world data, and leads to higher statistical power in a downstream application to genome-wide association studies.
FlowDirector: Training-Free Flow Steering for Precise Text-to-Video Editing
Text-driven video editing aims to modify video content according to natural language instructions. While recent training-free approaches have made progress by leveraging pre-trained diffusion models, they typically rely on inversion-based techniques that map input videos into the latent space, which often leads to temporal inconsistencies and degraded structural fidelity. To address this, we propose FlowDirector, a novel inversion-free video editing framework. Our framework models the editing process as a direct evolution in data space, guiding the video via an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) to smoothly transition along its inherent spatiotemporal manifold, thereby preserving temporal coherence and structural details. To achieve localized and controllable edits, we introduce an attention-guided masking mechanism that modulates the ODE velocity field, preserving non-target regions both spatially and temporally. Furthermore, to address incomplete edits and enhance semantic alignment with editing instructions, we present a guidance-enhanced editing strategy inspired by Classifier-Free Guidance, which leverages differential signals between multiple candidate flows to steer the editing trajectory toward stronger semantic alignment without compromising structural consistency. Extensive experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that FlowDirector achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction adherence, temporal consistency, and background preservation, establishing a new paradigm for efficient and coherent video editing without inversion.
TFG-Flow: Training-free Guidance in Multimodal Generative Flow
Given an unconditional generative model and a predictor for a target property (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. As a highly efficient technique for steering generative models toward flexible outcomes, training-free guidance has gained increasing attention in diffusion models. However, existing methods only handle data in continuous spaces, while many scientific applications involve both continuous and discrete data (referred to as multimodality). Another emerging trend is the growing use of the simple and general flow matching framework in building generative foundation models, where guided generation remains under-explored. To address this, we introduce TFG-Flow, a novel training-free guidance method for multimodal generative flow. TFG-Flow addresses the curse-of-dimensionality while maintaining the property of unbiased sampling in guiding discrete variables. We validate TFG-Flow on four molecular design tasks and show that TFG-Flow has great potential in drug design by generating molecules with desired properties.
Improving the Training of Rectified Flows
Diffusion models have shown great promise for image and video generation, but sampling from state-of-the-art models requires expensive numerical integration of a generative ODE. One approach for tackling this problem is rectified flows, which iteratively learn smooth ODE paths that are less susceptible to truncation error. However, rectified flows still require a relatively large number of function evaluations (NFEs). In this work, we propose improved techniques for training rectified flows, allowing them to compete with knowledge distillation methods even in the low NFE setting. Our main insight is that under realistic settings, a single iteration of the Reflow algorithm for training rectified flows is sufficient to learn nearly straight trajectories; hence, the current practice of using multiple Reflow iterations is unnecessary. We thus propose techniques to improve one-round training of rectified flows, including a U-shaped timestep distribution and LPIPS-Huber premetric. With these techniques, we improve the FID of the previous 2-rectified flow by up to 72% in the 1 NFE setting on CIFAR-10. On ImageNet 64times64, our improved rectified flow outperforms the state-of-the-art distillation methods such as consistency distillation and progressive distillation in both one-step and two-step settings and rivals the performance of improved consistency training (iCT) in FID. Code is available at https://github.com/sangyun884/rfpp.
SAC Flow: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning of Flow-Based Policies via Velocity-Reparameterized Sequential Modeling
Training expressive flow-based policies with off-policy reinforcement learning is notoriously unstable due to gradient pathologies in the multi-step action sampling process. We trace this instability to a fundamental connection: the flow rollout is algebraically equivalent to a residual recurrent computation, making it susceptible to the same vanishing and exploding gradients as RNNs. To address this, we reparameterize the velocity network using principles from modern sequential models, introducing two stable architectures: Flow-G, which incorporates a gated velocity, and Flow-T, which utilizes a decoded velocity. We then develop a practical SAC-based algorithm, enabled by a noise-augmented rollout, that facilitates direct end-to-end training of these policies. Our approach supports both from-scratch and offline-to-online learning and achieves state-of-the-art performance on continuous control and robotic manipulation benchmarks, eliminating the need for common workarounds like policy distillation or surrogate objectives.
Self-Corrected Flow Distillation for Consistent One-Step and Few-Step Text-to-Image Generation
Flow matching has emerged as a promising framework for training generative models, demonstrating impressive empirical performance while offering relative ease of training compared to diffusion-based models. However, this method still requires numerous function evaluations in the sampling process. To address these limitations, we introduce a self-corrected flow distillation method that effectively integrates consistency models and adversarial training within the flow-matching framework. This work is a pioneer in achieving consistent generation quality in both few-step and one-step sampling. Our extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, yielding superior results both quantitatively and qualitatively on CelebA-HQ and zero-shot benchmarks on the COCO dataset. Our implementation is released at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/SCFlow
Flow-Anchored Consistency Models
Continuous-time Consistency Models (CMs) promise efficient few-step generation but face significant challenges with training instability. We argue this instability stems from a fundamental conflict: by training a network to learn only a shortcut across a probability flow, the model loses its grasp on the instantaneous velocity field that defines the flow. Our solution is to explicitly anchor the model in the underlying flow during training. We introduce the Flow-Anchored Consistency Model (FACM), a simple but effective training strategy that uses a Flow Matching (FM) task as an anchor for the primary CM shortcut objective. This Flow-Anchoring approach requires no architectural modifications and is broadly compatible with standard model architectures. By distilling a pre-trained LightningDiT model, our method achieves a state-of-the-art FID of 1.32 with two steps (NFE=2) and 1.76 with just one step (NFE=1) on ImageNet 256x256, significantly outperforming previous methods. This provides a general and effective recipe for building high-performance, few-step generative models. Our code and pretrained models: https://github.com/ali-vilab/FACM.
Analysis of learning a flow-based generative model from limited sample complexity
We study the problem of training a flow-based generative model, parametrized by a two-layer autoencoder, to sample from a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture. We provide a sharp end-to-end analysis of the problem. First, we provide a tight closed-form characterization of the learnt velocity field, when parametrized by a shallow denoising auto-encoder trained on a finite number n of samples from the target distribution. Building on this analysis, we provide a sharp description of the corresponding generative flow, which pushes the base Gaussian density forward to an approximation of the target density. In particular, we provide closed-form formulae for the distance between the mean of the generated mixture and the mean of the target mixture, which we show decays as Theta_n(1{n}). Finally, this rate is shown to be in fact Bayes-optimal.
Consistency Flow Matching: Defining Straight Flows with Velocity Consistency
Flow matching (FM) is a general framework for defining probability paths via Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) to transform between noise and data samples. Recent approaches attempt to straighten these flow trajectories to generate high-quality samples with fewer function evaluations, typically through iterative rectification methods or optimal transport solutions. In this paper, we introduce Consistency Flow Matching (Consistency-FM), a novel FM method that explicitly enforces self-consistency in the velocity field. Consistency-FM directly defines straight flows starting from different times to the same endpoint, imposing constraints on their velocity values. Additionally, we propose a multi-segment training approach for Consistency-FM to enhance expressiveness, achieving a better trade-off between sampling quality and speed. Preliminary experiments demonstrate that our Consistency-FM significantly improves training efficiency by converging 4.4x faster than consistency models and 1.7x faster than rectified flow models while achieving better generation quality. Our code is available at: https://github.com/YangLing0818/consistency_flow_matching
Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis
Diffusion models create data from noise by inverting the forward paths of data towards noise and have emerged as a powerful generative modeling technique for high-dimensional, perceptual data such as images and videos. Rectified flow is a recent generative model formulation that connects data and noise in a straight line. Despite its better theoretical properties and conceptual simplicity, it is not yet decisively established as standard practice. In this work, we improve existing noise sampling techniques for training rectified flow models by biasing them towards perceptually relevant scales. Through a large-scale study, we demonstrate the superior performance of this approach compared to established diffusion formulations for high-resolution text-to-image synthesis. Additionally, we present a novel transformer-based architecture for text-to-image generation that uses separate weights for the two modalities and enables a bidirectional flow of information between image and text tokens, improving text comprehension, typography, and human preference ratings. We demonstrate that this architecture follows predictable scaling trends and correlates lower validation loss to improved text-to-image synthesis as measured by various metrics and human evaluations. Our largest models outperform state-of-the-art models, and we will make our experimental data, code, and model weights publicly available.
TempFlow-GRPO: When Timing Matters for GRPO in Flow Models
Recent flow matching models for text-to-image generation have achieved remarkable quality, yet their integration with reinforcement learning for human preference alignment remains suboptimal, hindering fine-grained reward-based optimization. We observe that the key impediment to effective GRPO training of flow models is the temporal uniformity assumption in existing approaches: sparse terminal rewards with uniform credit assignment fail to capture the varying criticality of decisions across generation timesteps, resulting in inefficient exploration and suboptimal convergence. To remedy this shortcoming, we introduce TempFlow-GRPO (Temporal Flow GRPO), a principled GRPO framework that captures and exploits the temporal structure inherent in flow-based generation. TempFlow-GRPO introduces two key innovations: (i) a trajectory branching mechanism that provides process rewards by concentrating stochasticity at designated branching points, enabling precise credit assignment without requiring specialized intermediate reward models; and (ii) a noise-aware weighting scheme that modulates policy optimization according to the intrinsic exploration potential of each timestep, prioritizing learning during high-impact early stages while ensuring stable refinement in later phases. These innovations endow the model with temporally-aware optimization that respects the underlying generative dynamics, leading to state-of-the-art performance in human preference alignment and standard text-to-image benchmarks.
Just Go with the Flow: Self-Supervised Scene Flow Estimation
When interacting with highly dynamic environments, scene flow allows autonomous systems to reason about the non-rigid motion of multiple independent objects. This is of particular interest in the field of autonomous driving, in which many cars, people, bicycles, and other objects need to be accurately tracked. Current state-of-the-art methods require annotated scene flow data from autonomous driving scenes to train scene flow networks with supervised learning. As an alternative, we present a method of training scene flow that uses two self-supervised losses, based on nearest neighbors and cycle consistency. These self-supervised losses allow us to train our method on large unlabeled autonomous driving datasets; the resulting method matches current state-of-the-art supervised performance using no real world annotations and exceeds state-of-the-art performance when combining our self-supervised approach with supervised learning on a smaller labeled dataset.
ReynoldsFlow: Exquisite Flow Estimation via Reynolds Transport Theorem
Optical flow is a fundamental technique for motion estimation, widely applied in video stabilization, interpolation, and object tracking. Traditional optical flow estimation methods rely on restrictive assumptions like brightness constancy and slow motion constraints. Recent deep learning-based flow estimations require extensive training on large domain-specific datasets, making them computationally demanding. Also, artificial intelligence (AI) advances have enabled deep learning models to take advantage of optical flow as an important feature for object tracking and motion analysis. Since optical flow is commonly encoded in HSV for visualization, its conversion to RGB for neural network processing is nonlinear and may introduce perceptual distortions. These transformations amplify the sensitivity to estimation errors, potentially affecting the predictive accuracy of the networks. To address these challenges that are influential to the performance of downstream network models, we propose Reynolds flow, a novel training-free flow estimation inspired by the Reynolds transport theorem, offering a principled approach to modeling complex motion dynamics. In addition to conventional HSV-based visualization of Reynolds flow, we also introduce an RGB-encoded representation of Reynolds flow designed to improve flow visualization and feature enhancement for neural networks. We evaluated the effectiveness of Reynolds flow in video-based tasks. Experimental results on three benchmarks, tiny object detection on UAVDB, infrared object detection on Anti-UAV, and pose estimation on GolfDB, demonstrate that networks trained with RGB-encoded Reynolds flow achieve SOTA performance, exhibiting improved robustness and efficiency across all tasks.
NeuroNER: an easy-to-use program for named-entity recognition based on neural networks
Named-entity recognition (NER) aims at identifying entities of interest in a text. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have recently been shown to outperform existing NER systems. However, ANNs remain challenging to use for non-expert users. In this paper, we present NeuroNER, an easy-to-use named-entity recognition tool based on ANNs. Users can annotate entities using a graphical web-based user interface (BRAT): the annotations are then used to train an ANN, which in turn predict entities' locations and categories in new texts. NeuroNER makes this annotation-training-prediction flow smooth and accessible to anyone.
LayerSync: Self-aligning Intermediate Layers
We propose LayerSync, a domain-agnostic approach for improving the generation quality and the training efficiency of diffusion models. Prior studies have highlighted the connection between the quality of generation and the representations learned by diffusion models, showing that external guidance on model intermediate representations accelerates training. We reconceptualize this paradigm by regularizing diffusion models with their own intermediate representations. Building on the observation that representation quality varies across diffusion model layers, we show that the most semantically rich representations can act as an intrinsic guidance for weaker ones, reducing the need for external supervision. Our approach, LayerSync, is a self-sufficient, plug-and-play regularizer term with no overhead on diffusion model training and generalizes beyond the visual domain to other modalities. LayerSync requires no pretrained models nor additional data. We extensively evaluate the method on image generation and demonstrate its applicability to other domains such as audio, video, and motion generation. We show that it consistently improves the generation quality and the training efficiency. For example, we speed up the training of flow-based transformer by over 8.75x on ImageNet dataset and improved the generation quality by 23.6%. The code is available at https://github.com/vita-epfl/LayerSync.
On the Stability of Iterative Retraining of Generative Models on their own Data
Deep generative models have made tremendous progress in modeling complex data, often exhibiting generation quality that surpasses a typical human's ability to discern the authenticity of samples. Undeniably, a key driver of this success is enabled by the massive amounts of web-scale data consumed by these models. Due to these models' striking performance and ease of availability, the web will inevitably be increasingly populated with synthetic content. Such a fact directly implies that future iterations of generative models must contend with the reality that their training is curated from both clean data and artificially generated data from past models. In this paper, we develop a framework to rigorously study the impact of training generative models on mixed datasets (of real and synthetic data) on their stability. We first prove the stability of iterative training under the condition that the initial generative models approximate the data distribution well enough and the proportion of clean training data (w.r.t. synthetic data) is large enough. We empirically validate our theory on both synthetic and natural images by iteratively training normalizing flows and state-of-the-art diffusion models on CIFAR10 and FFHQ.
FLUX that Plays Music
This paper explores a simple extension of diffusion-based rectified flow Transformers for text-to-music generation, termed as FluxMusic. Generally, along with design in advanced Fluxhttps://github.com/black-forest-labs/flux model, we transfers it into a latent VAE space of mel-spectrum. It involves first applying a sequence of independent attention to the double text-music stream, followed by a stacked single music stream for denoised patch prediction. We employ multiple pre-trained text encoders to sufficiently capture caption semantic information as well as inference flexibility. In between, coarse textual information, in conjunction with time step embeddings, is utilized in a modulation mechanism, while fine-grained textual details are concatenated with the music patch sequence as inputs. Through an in-depth study, we demonstrate that rectified flow training with an optimized architecture significantly outperforms established diffusion methods for the text-to-music task, as evidenced by various automatic metrics and human preference evaluations. Our experimental data, code, and model weights are made publicly available at: https://github.com/feizc/FluxMusic.
ERNIE-GEN: An Enhanced Multi-Flow Pre-training and Fine-tuning Framework for Natural Language Generation
Current pre-training works in natural language generation pay little attention to the problem of exposure bias on downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose an enhanced multi-flow sequence to sequence pre-training and fine-tuning framework named ERNIE-GEN, which bridges the discrepancy between training and inference with an infilling generation mechanism and a noise-aware generation method. To make generation closer to human writing patterns, this framework introduces a span-by-span generation flow that trains the model to predict semantically-complete spans consecutively rather than predicting word by word. Unlike existing pre-training methods, ERNIE-GEN incorporates multi-granularity target sampling to construct pre-training data, which enhances the correlation between encoder and decoder. Experimental results demonstrate that ERNIE-GEN achieves state-of-the-art results with a much smaller amount of pre-training data and parameters on a range of language generation tasks, including abstractive summarization (Gigaword and CNN/DailyMail), question generation (SQuAD), dialogue generation (Persona-Chat) and generative question answering (CoQA).
Flow Matching for Generative Modeling
We introduce a new paradigm for generative modeling built on Continuous Normalizing Flows (CNFs), allowing us to train CNFs at unprecedented scale. Specifically, we present the notion of Flow Matching (FM), a simulation-free approach for training CNFs based on regressing vector fields of fixed conditional probability paths. Flow Matching is compatible with a general family of Gaussian probability paths for transforming between noise and data samples -- which subsumes existing diffusion paths as specific instances. Interestingly, we find that employing FM with diffusion paths results in a more robust and stable alternative for training diffusion models. Furthermore, Flow Matching opens the door to training CNFs with other, non-diffusion probability paths. An instance of particular interest is using Optimal Transport (OT) displacement interpolation to define the conditional probability paths. These paths are more efficient than diffusion paths, provide faster training and sampling, and result in better generalization. Training CNFs using Flow Matching on ImageNet leads to consistently better performance than alternative diffusion-based methods in terms of both likelihood and sample quality, and allows fast and reliable sample generation using off-the-shelf numerical ODE solvers.
Training Consistency Models with Variational Noise Coupling
Consistency Training (CT) has recently emerged as a promising alternative to diffusion models, achieving competitive performance in image generation tasks. However, non-distillation consistency training often suffers from high variance and instability, and analyzing and improving its training dynamics is an active area of research. In this work, we propose a novel CT training approach based on the Flow Matching framework. Our main contribution is a trained noise-coupling scheme inspired by the architecture of Variational Autoencoders (VAE). By training a data-dependent noise emission model implemented as an encoder architecture, our method can indirectly learn the geometry of the noise-to-data mapping, which is instead fixed by the choice of the forward process in classical CT. Empirical results across diverse image datasets show significant generative improvements, with our model outperforming baselines and achieving the state-of-the-art (SoTA) non-distillation CT FID on CIFAR-10, and attaining FID on par with SoTA on ImageNet at 64 times 64 resolution in 2-step generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/sony/vct .
Flow Matching in Latent Space
Flow matching is a recent framework to train generative models that exhibits impressive empirical performance while being relatively easier to train compared with diffusion-based models. Despite its advantageous properties, prior methods still face the challenges of expensive computing and a large number of function evaluations of off-the-shelf solvers in the pixel space. Furthermore, although latent-based generative methods have shown great success in recent years, this particular model type remains underexplored in this area. In this work, we propose to apply flow matching in the latent spaces of pretrained autoencoders, which offers improved computational efficiency and scalability for high-resolution image synthesis. This enables flow-matching training on constrained computational resources while maintaining their quality and flexibility. Additionally, our work stands as a pioneering contribution in the integration of various conditions into flow matching for conditional generation tasks, including label-conditioned image generation, image inpainting, and semantic-to-image generation. Through extensive experiments, our approach demonstrates its effectiveness in both quantitative and qualitative results on various datasets, such as CelebA-HQ, FFHQ, LSUN Church & Bedroom, and ImageNet. We also provide a theoretical control of the Wasserstein-2 distance between the reconstructed latent flow distribution and true data distribution, showing it is upper-bounded by the latent flow matching objective. Our code will be available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/LFM.git.
Weighted Conditional Flow Matching
Conditional flow matching (CFM) has emerged as a powerful framework for training continuous normalizing flows due to its computational efficiency and effectiveness. However, standard CFM often produces paths that deviate significantly from straight-line interpolations between prior and target distributions, making generation slower and less accurate due to the need for fine discretization at inference. Recent methods enhance CFM performance by inducing shorter and straighter trajectories but typically rely on computationally expensive mini-batch optimal transport (OT). Drawing insights from entropic optimal transport (EOT), we propose Weighted Conditional Flow Matching (W-CFM), a novel approach that modifies the classical CFM loss by weighting each training pair (x, y) with a Gibbs kernel. We show that this weighting recovers the entropic OT coupling up to some bias in the marginals, and we provide the conditions under which the marginals remain nearly unchanged. Moreover, we establish an equivalence between W-CFM and the minibatch OT method in the large-batch limit, showing how our method overcomes computational and performance bottlenecks linked to batch size. Empirically, we test our method on unconditional generation on various synthetic and real datasets, confirming that W-CFM achieves comparable or superior sample quality, fidelity, and diversity to other alternative baselines while maintaining the computational efficiency of vanilla CFM.
Smooth Normalizing Flows
Normalizing flows are a promising tool for modeling probability distributions in physical systems. While state-of-the-art flows accurately approximate distributions and energies, applications in physics additionally require smooth energies to compute forces and higher-order derivatives. Furthermore, such densities are often defined on non-trivial topologies. A recent example are Boltzmann Generators for generating 3D-structures of peptides and small proteins. These generative models leverage the space of internal coordinates (dihedrals, angles, and bonds), which is a product of hypertori and compact intervals. In this work, we introduce a class of smooth mixture transformations working on both compact intervals and hypertori. Mixture transformations employ root-finding methods to invert them in practice, which has so far prevented bi-directional flow training. To this end, we show that parameter gradients and forces of such inverses can be computed from forward evaluations via the inverse function theorem. We demonstrate two advantages of such smooth flows: they allow training by force matching to simulation data and can be used as potentials in molecular dynamics simulations.
TO-FLOW: Efficient Continuous Normalizing Flows with Temporal Optimization adjoint with Moving Speed
Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) construct invertible mappings between an arbitrary complex distribution and an isotropic Gaussian distribution using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (neural ODEs). It has not been tractable on large datasets due to the incremental complexity of the neural ODE training. Optimal Transport theory has been applied to regularize the dynamics of the ODE to speed up training in recent works. In this paper, a temporal optimization is proposed by optimizing the evolutionary time for forward propagation of the neural ODE training. In this appoach, we optimize the network weights of the CNF alternately with evolutionary time by coordinate descent. Further with temporal regularization, stability of the evolution is ensured. This approach can be used in conjunction with the original regularization approach. We have experimentally demonstrated that the proposed approach can significantly accelerate training without sacrifying performance over baseline models.
Fast Text-to-Audio Generation with Adversarial Post-Training
Text-to-audio systems, while increasingly performant, are slow at inference time, thus making their latency unpractical for many creative applications. We present Adversarial Relativistic-Contrastive (ARC) post-training, the first adversarial acceleration algorithm for diffusion/flow models not based on distillation. While past adversarial post-training methods have struggled to compare against their expensive distillation counterparts, ARC post-training is a simple procedure that (1) extends a recent relativistic adversarial formulation to diffusion/flow post-training and (2) combines it with a novel contrastive discriminator objective to encourage better prompt adherence. We pair ARC post-training with a number optimizations to Stable Audio Open and build a model capable of generating approx12s of 44.1kHz stereo audio in approx75ms on an H100, and approx7s on a mobile edge-device, the fastest text-to-audio model to our knowledge.
INRFlow: Flow Matching for INRs in Ambient Space
Flow matching models have emerged as a powerful method for generative modeling on domains like images or videos, and even on irregular or unstructured data like 3D point clouds or even protein structures. These models are commonly trained in two stages: first, a data compressor is trained, and in a subsequent training stage a flow matching generative model is trained in the latent space of the data compressor. This two-stage paradigm sets obstacles for unifying models across data domains, as hand-crafted compressors architectures are used for different data modalities. To this end, we introduce INRFlow, a domain-agnostic approach to learn flow matching transformers directly in ambient space. Drawing inspiration from INRs, we introduce a conditionally independent point-wise training objective that enables INRFlow to make predictions continuously in coordinate space. Our empirical results demonstrate that INRFlow effectively handles different data modalities such as images, 3D point clouds and protein structure data, achieving strong performance in different domains and outperforming comparable approaches. INRFlow is a promising step towards domain-agnostic flow matching generative models that can be trivially adopted in different data domains.
Temporal Event Stereo via Joint Learning with Stereoscopic Flow
Event cameras are dynamic vision sensors inspired by the biological retina, characterized by their high dynamic range, high temporal resolution, and low power consumption. These features make them capable of perceiving 3D environments even in extreme conditions. Event data is continuous across the time dimension, which allows a detailed description of each pixel's movements. To fully utilize the temporally dense and continuous nature of event cameras, we propose a novel temporal event stereo, a framework that continuously uses information from previous time steps. This is accomplished through the simultaneous training of an event stereo matching network alongside stereoscopic flow, a new concept that captures all pixel movements from stereo cameras. Since obtaining ground truth for optical flow during training is challenging, we propose a method that uses only disparity maps to train the stereoscopic flow. The performance of event-based stereo matching is enhanced by temporally aggregating information using the flows. We have achieved state-of-the-art performance on the MVSEC and the DSEC datasets. The method is computationally efficient, as it stacks previous information in a cascading manner. The code is available at https://github.com/mickeykang16/TemporalEventStereo.
Flow Matching on General Geometries
We propose Riemannian Flow Matching (RFM), a simple yet powerful framework for training continuous normalizing flows on manifolds. Existing methods for generative modeling on manifolds either require expensive simulation, are inherently unable to scale to high dimensions, or use approximations for limiting quantities that result in biased training objectives. Riemannian Flow Matching bypasses these limitations and offers several advantages over previous approaches: it is simulation-free on simple geometries, does not require divergence computation, and computes its target vector field in closed-form. The key ingredient behind RFM is the construction of a relatively simple premetric for defining target vector fields, which encompasses the existing Euclidean case. To extend to general geometries, we rely on the use of spectral decompositions to efficiently compute premetrics on the fly. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on many real-world non-Euclidean datasets, and we demonstrate tractable training on general geometries, including triangular meshes with highly non-trivial curvature and boundaries.
ContentV: Efficient Training of Video Generation Models with Limited Compute
Recent advances in video generation demand increasingly efficient training recipes to mitigate escalating computational costs. In this report, we present ContentV, an 8B-parameter text-to-video model that achieves state-of-the-art performance (85.14 on VBench) after training on 256 x 64GB Neural Processing Units (NPUs) for merely four weeks. ContentV generates diverse, high-quality videos across multiple resolutions and durations from text prompts, enabled by three key innovations: (1) A minimalist architecture that maximizes reuse of pre-trained image generation models for video generation; (2) A systematic multi-stage training strategy leveraging flow matching for enhanced efficiency; and (3) A cost-effective reinforcement learning with human feedback framework that improves generation quality without requiring additional human annotations. All the code and models are available at: https://contentv.github.io.
FlexTok: Resampling Images into 1D Token Sequences of Flexible Length
Image tokenization has enabled major advances in autoregressive image generation by providing compressed, discrete representations that are more efficient to process than raw pixels. While traditional approaches use 2D grid tokenization, recent methods like TiTok have shown that 1D tokenization can achieve high generation quality by eliminating grid redundancies. However, these methods typically use a fixed number of tokens and thus cannot adapt to an image's inherent complexity. We introduce FlexTok, a tokenizer that projects 2D images into variable-length, ordered 1D token sequences. For example, a 256x256 image can be resampled into anywhere from 1 to 256 discrete tokens, hierarchically and semantically compressing its information. By training a rectified flow model as the decoder and using nested dropout, FlexTok produces plausible reconstructions regardless of the chosen token sequence length. We evaluate our approach in an autoregressive generation setting using a simple GPT-style Transformer. On ImageNet, this approach achieves an FID<2 across 8 to 128 tokens, outperforming TiTok and matching state-of-the-art methods with far fewer tokens. We further extend the model to support to text-conditioned image generation and examine how FlexTok relates to traditional 2D tokenization. A key finding is that FlexTok enables next-token prediction to describe images in a coarse-to-fine "visual vocabulary", and that the number of tokens to generate depends on the complexity of the generation task.
LAPP: Layer Adaptive Progressive Pruning for Compressing CNNs from Scratch
Structured pruning is a commonly used convolutional neural network (CNN) compression approach. Pruning rate setting is a fundamental problem in structured pruning. Most existing works introduce too many additional learnable parameters to assign different pruning rates across different layers in CNN or cannot control the compression rate explicitly. Since too narrow network blocks information flow for training, automatic pruning rate setting cannot explore a high pruning rate for a specific layer. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework named Layer Adaptive Progressive Pruning (LAPP), which gradually compresses the network during initial training of a few epochs from scratch. In particular, LAPP designs an effective and efficient pruning strategy that introduces a learnable threshold for each layer and FLOPs constraints for network. Guided by both task loss and FLOPs constraints, the learnable thresholds are dynamically and gradually updated to accommodate changes of importance scores during training. Therefore the pruning strategy can gradually prune the network and automatically determine the appropriate pruning rates for each layer. What's more, in order to maintain the expressive power of the pruned layer, before training starts, we introduce an additional lightweight bypass for each convolutional layer to be pruned, which only adds relatively few additional burdens. Our method demonstrates superior performance gains over previous compression methods on various datasets and backbone architectures. For example, on CIFAR-10, our method compresses ResNet-20 to 40.3% without accuracy drop. 55.6% of FLOPs of ResNet-18 are reduced with 0.21% top-1 accuracy increase and 0.40% top-5 accuracy increase on ImageNet.
AnimateAnyMesh: A Feed-Forward 4D Foundation Model for Text-Driven Universal Mesh Animation
Recent advances in 4D content generation have attracted increasing attention, yet creating high-quality animated 3D models remains challenging due to the complexity of modeling spatio-temporal distributions and the scarcity of 4D training data. In this paper, we present AnimateAnyMesh, the first feed-forward framework that enables efficient text-driven animation of arbitrary 3D meshes. Our approach leverages a novel DyMeshVAE architecture that effectively compresses and reconstructs dynamic mesh sequences by disentangling spatial and temporal features while preserving local topological structures. To enable high-quality text-conditional generation, we employ a Rectified Flow-based training strategy in the compressed latent space. Additionally, we contribute the DyMesh Dataset, containing over 4M diverse dynamic mesh sequences with text annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates semantically accurate and temporally coherent mesh animations in a few seconds, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both quality and efficiency. Our work marks a substantial step forward in making 4D content creation more accessible and practical. All the data, code, and models will be open-released.
Learning GFlowNets from partial episodes for improved convergence and stability
Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are a family of algorithms for training a sequential sampler of discrete objects under an unnormalized target density and have been successfully used for various probabilistic modeling tasks. Existing training objectives for GFlowNets are either local to states or transitions, or propagate a reward signal over an entire sampling trajectory. We argue that these alternatives represent opposite ends of a gradient bias-variance tradeoff and propose a way to exploit this tradeoff to mitigate its harmful effects. Inspired by the TD(lambda) algorithm in reinforcement learning, we introduce subtrajectory balance or SubTB(lambda), a GFlowNet training objective that can learn from partial action subsequences of varying lengths. We show that SubTB(lambda) accelerates sampler convergence in previously studied and new environments and enables training GFlowNets in environments with longer action sequences and sparser reward landscapes than what was possible before. We also perform a comparative analysis of stochastic gradient dynamics, shedding light on the bias-variance tradeoff in GFlowNet training and the advantages of subtrajectory balance.
ProReflow: Progressive Reflow with Decomposed Velocity
Diffusion models have achieved significant progress in both image and video generation while still suffering from huge computation costs. As an effective solution, flow matching aims to reflow the diffusion process of diffusion models into a straight line for a few-step and even one-step generation. However, in this paper, we suggest that the original training pipeline of flow matching is not optimal and introduce two techniques to improve it. Firstly, we introduce progressive reflow, which progressively reflows the diffusion models in local timesteps until the whole diffusion progresses, reducing the difficulty of flow matching. Second, we introduce aligned v-prediction, which highlights the importance of direction matching in flow matching over magnitude matching. Experimental results on SDv1.5 and SDXL demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, for example, conducting on SDv1.5 achieves an FID of 10.70 on MSCOCO2014 validation set with only 4 sampling steps, close to our teacher model (32 DDIM steps, FID = 10.05).
VideoCutLER: Surprisingly Simple Unsupervised Video Instance Segmentation
Existing approaches to unsupervised video instance segmentation typically rely on motion estimates and experience difficulties tracking small or divergent motions. We present VideoCutLER, a simple method for unsupervised multi-instance video segmentation without using motion-based learning signals like optical flow or training on natural videos. Our key insight is that using high-quality pseudo masks and a simple video synthesis method for model training is surprisingly sufficient to enable the resulting video model to effectively segment and track multiple instances across video frames. We show the first competitive unsupervised learning results on the challenging YouTubeVIS-2019 benchmark, achieving 50.7% APvideo^50 , surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin. VideoCutLER can also serve as a strong pretrained model for supervised video instance segmentation tasks, exceeding DINO by 15.9% on YouTubeVIS-2019 in terms of APvideo.
Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Generative Flow Networks
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized samplers that learn stochastic policies to sequentially generate compositional objects from a given unnormalized reward distribution. They can generate diverse sets of high-reward objects, which is an important consideration in scientific discovery tasks. However, as they are typically trained from a given extrinsic reward function, it remains an important open challenge about how to leverage the power of pre-training and train GFlowNets in an unsupervised fashion for efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. Inspired by recent successes of unsupervised pre-training in various domains, we introduce a novel approach for reward-free pre-training of GFlowNets. By framing the training as a self-supervised problem, we propose an outcome-conditioned GFlowNet (OC-GFN) that learns to explore the candidate space. Specifically, OC-GFN learns to reach any targeted outcomes, akin to goal-conditioned policies in reinforcement learning. We show that the pre-trained OC-GFN model can allow for a direct extraction of a policy capable of sampling from any new reward functions in downstream tasks. Nonetheless, adapting OC-GFN on a downstream task-specific reward involves an intractable marginalization over possible outcomes. We propose a novel way to approximate this marginalization by learning an amortized predictor enabling efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating the effectiveness of pre-training the OC-GFN, and its ability to swiftly adapt to downstream tasks and discover modes more efficiently. This work may serve as a foundation for further exploration of pre-training strategies in the context of GFlowNets.
Training Energy-Based Normalizing Flow with Score-Matching Objectives
In this paper, we establish a connection between the parameterization of flow-based and energy-based generative models, and present a new flow-based modeling approach called energy-based normalizing flow (EBFlow). We demonstrate that by optimizing EBFlow with score-matching objectives, the computation of Jacobian determinants for linear transformations can be entirely bypassed. This feature enables the use of arbitrary linear layers in the construction of flow-based models without increasing the computational time complexity of each training iteration from O(D^2L) to O(D^3L) for an L-layered model that accepts D-dimensional inputs. This makes the training of EBFlow more efficient than the commonly-adopted maximum likelihood training method. In addition to the reduction in runtime, we enhance the training stability and empirical performance of EBFlow through a number of techniques developed based on our analysis of the score-matching methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant speedup compared to maximum likelihood estimation while outperforming prior methods with a noticeable margin in terms of negative log-likelihood (NLL).
SlimFlow: Training Smaller One-Step Diffusion Models with Rectified Flow
Diffusion models excel in high-quality generation but suffer from slow inference due to iterative sampling. While recent methods have successfully transformed diffusion models into one-step generators, they neglect model size reduction, limiting their applicability in compute-constrained scenarios. This paper aims to develop small, efficient one-step diffusion models based on the powerful rectified flow framework, by exploring joint compression of inference steps and model size. The rectified flow framework trains one-step generative models using two operations, reflow and distillation. Compared with the original framework, squeezing the model size brings two new challenges: (1) the initialization mismatch between large teachers and small students during reflow; (2) the underperformance of naive distillation on small student models. To overcome these issues, we propose Annealing Reflow and Flow-Guided Distillation, which together comprise our SlimFlow framework. With our novel framework, we train a one-step diffusion model with an FID of 5.02 and 15.7M parameters, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art one-step diffusion model (FID=6.47, 19.4M parameters) on CIFAR10. On ImageNet 64times64 and FFHQ 64times64, our method yields small one-step diffusion models that are comparable to larger models, showcasing the effectiveness of our method in creating compact, efficient one-step diffusion models.
Stable Flow: Vital Layers for Training-Free Image Editing
Diffusion models have revolutionized the field of content synthesis and editing. Recent models have replaced the traditional UNet architecture with the Diffusion Transformer (DiT), and employed flow-matching for improved training and sampling. However, they exhibit limited generation diversity. In this work, we leverage this limitation to perform consistent image edits via selective injection of attention features. The main challenge is that, unlike the UNet-based models, DiT lacks a coarse-to-fine synthesis structure, making it unclear in which layers to perform the injection. Therefore, we propose an automatic method to identify "vital layers" within DiT, crucial for image formation, and demonstrate how these layers facilitate a range of controlled stable edits, from non-rigid modifications to object addition, using the same mechanism. Next, to enable real-image editing, we introduce an improved image inversion method for flow models. Finally, we evaluate our approach through qualitative and quantitative comparisons, along with a user study, and demonstrate its effectiveness across multiple applications. The project page is available at https://omriavrahami.com/stable-flow
HiFlow: Training-free High-Resolution Image Generation with Flow-Aligned Guidance
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion/flow models have drawn considerable attention recently due to their remarkable ability to deliver flexible visual creations. Still, high-resolution image synthesis presents formidable challenges due to the scarcity and complexity of high-resolution content. To this end, we present HiFlow, a training-free and model-agnostic framework to unlock the resolution potential of pre-trained flow models. Specifically, HiFlow establishes a virtual reference flow within the high-resolution space that effectively captures the characteristics of low-resolution flow information, offering guidance for high-resolution generation through three key aspects: initialization alignment for low-frequency consistency, direction alignment for structure preservation, and acceleration alignment for detail fidelity. By leveraging this flow-aligned guidance, HiFlow substantially elevates the quality of high-resolution image synthesis of T2I models and demonstrates versatility across their personalized variants. Extensive experiments validate HiFlow's superiority in achieving superior high-resolution image quality over current state-of-the-art methods.
Flow of Reasoning: Efficient Training of LLM Policy with Divergent Thinking
Divergent thinking, the cognitive process of generating diverse solutions, is a hallmark of human creativity and problem-solving. For machines, sampling diverse solution trajectories in complex reasoning problems is crucial for robust outcomes, data augmentation, and enhanced model generalization. Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with generating high-quality, diverse reasoning. While supervised fine-tuning helps with quality, it requires extensive supervision data to capture the full diversity of solutions. Alternatively, reinforcement learning methods like PPO aim to find limited highest-reward solutions while neglecting the solution diversity, akin to convergent thinking. To address these limitations, we propose Flow of Reasoning (FoR) -- an efficient LLM training approach enabling diverse reasoning with minimal data. FoR formulates multi-step LLM reasoning as a Markovian flow from an initial state to terminal states. The formulation allows to adapt principled GFlowNet approaches to train the LLM as a policy, which is able to sample multiple reasoning paths with probabilities proportional to the unnormalized reward. Empirical results show that, with limited training data (e.g., 15 examples), FoR can discover diverse high-quality solutions that excel greatly beyond current state-of-the-art methods across three tasks, including embodied reasoning (BlocksWorld), math puzzle solving (Game24), and logical reasoning (PrOntoQA). Code is available at https://github.com/Yu-Fangxu/FoR.
Progressive Gradient Flow for Robust N:M Sparsity Training in Transformers
N:M Structured sparsity has garnered significant interest as a result of relatively modest overhead and improved efficiency. Additionally, this form of sparsity holds considerable appeal for reducing the memory footprint owing to their modest representation overhead. There have been efforts to develop training recipes for N:M structured sparsity, they primarily focus on low-sparsity regions (sim50\%). Nonetheless, performance of models trained using these approaches tends to decline when confronted with high-sparsity regions (>80\%). In this work, we study the effectiveness of existing sparse training recipes at high-sparsity regions and argue that these methods fail to sustain the model quality on par with low-sparsity regions. We demonstrate that the significant factor contributing to this disparity is the presence of elevated levels of induced noise in the gradient magnitudes. To mitigate this undesirable effect, we employ decay mechanisms to progressively restrict the flow of gradients towards pruned elements. Our approach improves the model quality by up to 2% and 5% in vision and language models at high sparsity regime, respectively. We also evaluate the trade-off between model accuracy and training compute cost in terms of FLOPs. At iso-training FLOPs, our method yields better performance compared to conventional sparse training recipes, exhibiting an accuracy improvement of up to 2%. The source code is available at https://github.com/abhibambhaniya/progressive_gradient_flow_nm_sparsity.
SFBD Flow: A Continuous-Optimization Framework for Training Diffusion Models with Noisy Samples
Diffusion models achieve strong generative performance but often rely on large datasets that may include sensitive content. This challenge is compounded by the models' tendency to memorize training data, raising privacy concerns. SFBD (Lu et al., 2025) addresses this by training on corrupted data and using limited clean samples to capture local structure and improve convergence. However, its iterative denoising and fine-tuning loop requires manual coordination, making it burdensome to implement. We reinterpret SFBD as an alternating projection algorithm and introduce a continuous variant, SFBD flow, that removes the need for alternating steps. We further show its connection to consistency constraint-based methods, and demonstrate that its practical instantiation, Online SFBD, consistently outperforms strong baselines across benchmarks.
SimFlow: Simplified and End-to-End Training of Latent Normalizing Flows
Normalizing Flows (NFs) learn invertible mappings between the data and a Gaussian distribution. Prior works usually suffer from two limitations. First, they add random noise to training samples or VAE latents as data augmentation, introducing complex pipelines including extra noising and denoising steps. Second, they use a pretrained and frozen VAE encoder, resulting in suboptimal reconstruction and generation quality. In this paper, we find that the two issues can be solved in a very simple way: just fixing the variance (which would otherwise be predicted by the VAE encoder) to a constant (e.g., 0.5). On the one hand, this method allows the encoder to output a broader distribution of tokens and the decoder to learn to reconstruct clean images from the augmented token distribution, avoiding additional noise or denoising design. On the other hand, fixed variance simplifies the VAE evidence lower bound, making it stable to train an NF with a VAE jointly. On the ImageNet 256 times 256 generation task, our model SimFlow obtains a gFID score of 2.15, outperforming the state-of-the-art method STARFlow (gFID 2.40). Moreover, SimFlow can be seamlessly integrated with the end-to-end representation alignment (REPA-E) method and achieves an improved gFID of 1.91, setting a new state of the art among NFs.
MEMFOF: High-Resolution Training for Memory-Efficient Multi-Frame Optical Flow Estimation
Recent advances in optical flow estimation have prioritized accuracy at the cost of growing GPU memory consumption, particularly for high-resolution (FullHD) inputs. We introduce MEMFOF, a memory-efficient multi-frame optical flow method that identifies a favorable trade-off between multi-frame estimation and GPU memory usage. Notably, MEMFOF requires only 2.09 GB of GPU memory at runtime for 1080p inputs, and 28.5 GB during training, which uniquely positions our method to be trained at native 1080p without the need for cropping or downsampling. We systematically revisit design choices from RAFT-like architectures, integrating reduced correlation volumes and high-resolution training protocols alongside multi-frame estimation, to achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks while substantially reducing memory overhead. Our method outperforms more resource-intensive alternatives in both accuracy and runtime efficiency, validating its robustness for flow estimation at high resolutions. At the time of submission, our method ranks first on the Spring benchmark with a 1-pixel (1px) outlier rate of 3.289, leads Sintel (clean) with an endpoint error (EPE) of 0.963, and achieves the best Fl-all error on KITTI-2015 at 2.94%. The code is available at https://github.com/msu-video-group/memfof.
Deep MMD Gradient Flow without adversarial training
We propose a gradient flow procedure for generative modeling by transporting particles from an initial source distribution to a target distribution, where the gradient field on the particles is given by a noise-adaptive Wasserstein Gradient of the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). The noise-adaptive MMD is trained on data distributions corrupted by increasing levels of noise, obtained via a forward diffusion process, as commonly used in denoising diffusion probabilistic models. The result is a generalization of MMD Gradient Flow, which we call Diffusion-MMD-Gradient Flow or DMMD. The divergence training procedure is related to discriminator training in Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), but does not require adversarial training. We obtain competitive empirical performance in unconditional image generation on CIFAR10, MNIST, CELEB-A (64 x64) and LSUN Church (64 x 64). Furthermore, we demonstrate the validity of the approach when MMD is replaced by a lower bound on the KL divergence.
Stack Over-Flowing with Results: The Case for Domain-Specific Pre-Training Over One-Size-Fits-All Models
Large pre-trained neural language models have brought immense progress to both NLP and software engineering. Models in OpenAI's GPT series now dwarf Google's BERT and Meta's RoBERTa, which previously set new benchmarks on a wide range of NLP applications. These models are trained on massive corpora of heterogeneous data from web crawls, which enables them to learn general language patterns and semantic relationships. However, the largest models are both expensive to train and deploy and are often closed-source, so we lack access to their data and design decisions. We argue that this trend towards large, general-purpose models should be complemented with single-purpose, more modestly sized pre-trained models. In this work, we take StackOverflow (SO) as a domain example in which large volumes of rich aligned code and text data is available. We adopt standard practices for pre-training large language models, including using a very large context size (2,048 tokens), batch size (0.5M tokens) and training set (27B tokens), coupled with a powerful toolkit (Megatron-LM), to train two models: SOBertBase, with 109M parameters, and SOBertLarge with 762M parameters, at a budget of just 187 and \800 each. We compare the performance of our models with both the previous SOTA model trained on SO data exclusively as well general-purpose BERT models and OpenAI's ChatGPT on four SO-specific downstream tasks - question quality prediction, closed question prediction, named entity recognition and obsoletion prediction (a new task we introduce). Not only do our models consistently outperform all baselines, the smaller model is often sufficient for strong results. Both models are released to the public. These results demonstrate that pre-training both extensively and properly on in-domain data can yield a powerful and affordable alternative to leveraging closed-source general-purpose models.
LoRAShop: Training-Free Multi-Concept Image Generation and Editing with Rectified Flow Transformers
We introduce LoRAShop, the first framework for multi-concept image editing with LoRA models. LoRAShop builds on a key observation about the feature interaction patterns inside Flux-style diffusion transformers: concept-specific transformer features activate spatially coherent regions early in the denoising process. We harness this observation to derive a disentangled latent mask for each concept in a prior forward pass and blend the corresponding LoRA weights only within regions bounding the concepts to be personalized. The resulting edits seamlessly integrate multiple subjects or styles into the original scene while preserving global context, lighting, and fine details. Our experiments demonstrate that LoRAShop delivers better identity preservation compared to baselines. By eliminating retraining and external constraints, LoRAShop turns personalized diffusion models into a practical `photoshop-with-LoRAs' tool and opens new avenues for compositional visual storytelling and rapid creative iteration.
FlowOpt: Fast Optimization Through Whole Flow Processes for Training-Free Editing
The remarkable success of diffusion and flow-matching models has ignited a surge of works on adapting them at test time for controlled generation tasks. Examples range from image editing to restoration, compression and personalization. However, due to the iterative nature of the sampling process in those models, it is computationally impractical to use gradient-based optimization to directly control the image generated at the end of the process. As a result, existing methods typically resort to manipulating each timestep separately. Here we introduce FlowOpt - a zero-order (gradient-free) optimization framework that treats the entire flow process as a black box, enabling optimization through the whole sampling path without backpropagation through the model. Our method is both highly efficient and allows users to monitor the intermediate optimization results and perform early stopping if desired. We prove a sufficient condition on FlowOpt's step-size, under which convergence to the global optimum is guaranteed. We further show how to empirically estimate this upper bound so as to choose an appropriate step-size. We demonstrate how FlowOpt can be used for image editing, showcasing two options: (i) inversion (determining the initial noise that generates a given image), and (ii) directly steering the edited image to be similar to the source image while conforming to a target text prompt. In both cases, FlowOpt achieves state-of-the-art results while using roughly the same number of neural function evaluations (NFEs) as existing methods. Code and examples are available on the project's webpage.
Generative Pre-training for Speech with Flow Matching
Generative models have gained more and more attention in recent years for their remarkable success in tasks that required estimating and sampling data distribution to generate high-fidelity synthetic data. In speech, text-to-speech synthesis and neural vocoder are good examples where generative models have shined. While generative models have been applied to different applications in speech, there exists no general-purpose generative model that models speech directly. In this work, we take a step toward this direction by showing a single pre-trained generative model can be adapted to different downstream tasks with strong performance. Specifically, we pre-trained a generative model, named SpeechFlow, on 60k hours of untranscribed speech with Flow Matching and masked conditions. Experiment results show the pre-trained generative model can be fine-tuned with task-specific data to match or surpass existing expert models on speech enhancement, separation, and synthesis. Our work suggested a foundational model for generation tasks in speech can be built with generative pre-training.
GraphCodeBERT: Pre-training Code Representations with Data Flow
Pre-trained models for programming language have achieved dramatic empirical improvements on a variety of code-related tasks such as code search, code completion, code summarization, etc. However, existing pre-trained models regard a code snippet as a sequence of tokens, while ignoring the inherent structure of code, which provides crucial code semantics and would enhance the code understanding process. We present GraphCodeBERT, a pre-trained model for programming language that considers the inherent structure of code. Instead of taking syntactic-level structure of code like abstract syntax tree (AST), we use data flow in the pre-training stage, which is a semantic-level structure of code that encodes the relation of "where-the-value-comes-from" between variables. Such a semantic-level structure is neat and does not bring an unnecessarily deep hierarchy of AST, the property of which makes the model more efficient. We develop GraphCodeBERT based on Transformer. In addition to using the task of masked language modeling, we introduce two structure-aware pre-training tasks. One is to predict code structure edges, and the other is to align representations between source code and code structure. We implement the model in an efficient way with a graph-guided masked attention function to incorporate the code structure. We evaluate our model on four tasks, including code search, clone detection, code translation, and code refinement. Results show that code structure and newly introduced pre-training tasks can improve GraphCodeBERT and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the four downstream tasks. We further show that the model prefers structure-level attentions over token-level attentions in the task of code search.
Dialog2Flow: Pre-training Soft-Contrastive Action-Driven Sentence Embeddings for Automatic Dialog Flow Extraction
Efficiently deriving structured workflows from unannotated dialogs remains an underexplored and formidable challenge in computational linguistics. Automating this process could significantly accelerate the manual design of workflows in new domains and enable the grounding of large language models in domain-specific flowcharts, enhancing transparency and controllability. In this paper, we introduce Dialog2Flow (D2F) embeddings, which differ from conventional sentence embeddings by mapping utterances to a latent space where they are grouped according to their communicative and informative functions (i.e., the actions they represent). D2F allows for modeling dialogs as continuous trajectories in a latent space with distinct action-related regions. By clustering D2F embeddings, the latent space is quantized, and dialogs can be converted into sequences of region/action IDs, facilitating the extraction of the underlying workflow. To pre-train D2F, we build a comprehensive dataset by unifying twenty task-oriented dialog datasets with normalized per-turn action annotations. We also introduce a novel soft contrastive loss that leverages the semantic information of these actions to guide the representation learning process, showing superior performance compared to standard supervised contrastive loss. Evaluation against various sentence embeddings, including dialog-specific ones, demonstrates that D2F yields superior qualitative and quantitative results across diverse domains.
CroCo v2: Improved Cross-view Completion Pre-training for Stereo Matching and Optical Flow
Despite impressive performance for high-level downstream tasks, self-supervised pre-training methods have not yet fully delivered on dense geometric vision tasks such as stereo matching or optical flow. The application of self-supervised concepts, such as instance discrimination or masked image modeling, to geometric tasks is an active area of research. In this work, we build on the recent cross-view completion framework, a variation of masked image modeling that leverages a second view from the same scene which makes it well suited for binocular downstream tasks. The applicability of this concept has so far been limited in at least two ways: (a) by the difficulty of collecting real-world image pairs -- in practice only synthetic data have been used -- and (b) by the lack of generalization of vanilla transformers to dense downstream tasks for which relative position is more meaningful than absolute position. We explore three avenues of improvement. First, we introduce a method to collect suitable real-world image pairs at large scale. Second, we experiment with relative positional embeddings and show that they enable vision transformers to perform substantially better. Third, we scale up vision transformer based cross-completion architectures, which is made possible by the use of large amounts of data. With these improvements, we show for the first time that state-of-the-art results on stereo matching and optical flow can be reached without using any classical task-specific techniques like correlation volume, iterative estimation, image warping or multi-scale reasoning, thus paving the way towards universal vision models.
FlowBack-Adjoint: Physics-Aware and Energy-Guided Conditional Flow-Matching for All-Atom Protein Backmapping
Coarse-grained (CG) molecular models of proteins can substantially increase the time and length scales accessible to molecular dynamics simulations of proteins, but recovery of accurate all-atom (AA) ensembles from CG simulation trajectories can be essential for exposing molecular mechanisms of folding and docking and for calculation of physical properties requiring atomistic detail. The recently reported deep generative model FlowBack restores AA detail to protein C-alpha traces using a flow-matching architecture and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in generation of AA structural ensembles. Training, however, is performed exclusively on structural data and the absence of any awareness of interatomic energies or forces within training results in small fractions of incorrect bond lengths, atomic clashes, and otherwise high-energy structures. In this work, we introduce FlowBack-Adjoint as a lightweight enhancement that upgrades the pre-trained FlowBack model through a one-time, physics-aware post-training pass. Auxiliary contributions to the flow introduce physical awareness of bond lengths and Lennard-Jones interactions and gradients of a molecular mechanics force field energy are incorporated via adjoint matching to steer the FlowBack-Adjoint vector field to produce lower-energy configurations. In benchmark tests against FlowBack, FlowBack-Adjoint lowers single-point energies by a median of ~78 kcal/mol.residue, reduces errors in bond lengths by >92%, eliminates >98% of molecular clashes, maintains excellent diversity of the AA configurational ensemble, and produces configurations capable of initializing stable all-atom molecular dynamics simulations without requiring energy relaxation. We propose FlowBack-Adjoint as an accurate and efficient physics-aware deep generative model for AA backmapping from C-alpha traces.
Better Training of GFlowNets with Local Credit and Incomplete Trajectories
Generative Flow Networks or GFlowNets are related to Monte-Carlo Markov chain methods (as they sample from a distribution specified by an energy function), reinforcement learning (as they learn a policy to sample composed objects through a sequence of steps), generative models (as they learn to represent and sample from a distribution) and amortized variational methods (as they can be used to learn to approximate and sample from an otherwise intractable posterior, given a prior and a likelihood). They are trained to generate an object x through a sequence of steps with probability proportional to some reward function R(x) (or exp(-E(x)) with E(x) denoting the energy function), given at the end of the generative trajectory. Like for other RL settings where the reward is only given at the end, the efficiency of training and credit assignment may suffer when those trajectories are longer. With previous GFlowNet work, no learning was possible from incomplete trajectories (lacking a terminal state and the computation of the associated reward). In this paper, we consider the case where the energy function can be applied not just to terminal states but also to intermediate states. This is for example achieved when the energy function is additive, with terms available along the trajectory. We show how to reparameterize the GFlowNet state flow function to take advantage of the partial reward already accrued at each state. This enables a training objective that can be applied to update parameters even with incomplete trajectories. Even when complete trajectories are available, being able to obtain more localized credit and gradients is found to speed up training convergence, as demonstrated across many simulations.
ARFlow: Autogressive Flow with Hybrid Linear Attention
Flow models are effective at progressively generating realistic images, but they generally struggle to capture long-range dependencies during the generation process as they compress all the information from previous time steps into a single corrupted image. To address this limitation, we propose integrating autoregressive modeling -- known for its excellence in modeling complex, high-dimensional joint probability distributions -- into flow models. During training, at each step, we construct causally-ordered sequences by sampling multiple images from the same semantic category and applying different levels of noise, where images with higher noise levels serve as causal predecessors to those with lower noise levels. This design enables the model to learn broader category-level variations while maintaining proper causal relationships in the flow process. During generation, the model autoregressively conditions the previously generated images from earlier denoising steps, forming a contextual and coherent generation trajectory. Additionally, we design a customized hybrid linear attention mechanism tailored to our modeling approach to enhance computational efficiency. Our approach, termed ARFlow, under 400k training steps, achieves 14.08 FID scores on ImageNet at 128 * 128 without classifier-free guidance, reaching 4.34 FID with classifier-free guidance 1.5, significantly outperforming the previous flow-based model SiT's 9.17 FID. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our modeling strategy and chunk-wise attention design.
Training-Free Reward-Guided Image Editing via Trajectory Optimal Control
Recent advancements in diffusion and flow-matching models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in high-fidelity image synthesis. A prominent line of research involves reward-guided guidance, which steers the generation process during inference to align with specific objectives. However, leveraging this reward-guided approach to the task of image editing, which requires preserving the semantic content of the source image while enhancing a target reward, is largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for training-free, reward-guided image editing. We formulate the editing process as a trajectory optimal control problem where the reverse process of a diffusion model is treated as a controllable trajectory originating from the source image, and the adjoint states are iteratively updated to steer the editing process. Through extensive experiments across distinct editing tasks, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing inversion-based training-free guidance baselines, achieving a superior balance between reward maximization and fidelity to the source image without reward hacking.
Symmetrical Flow Matching: Unified Image Generation, Segmentation, and Classification with Score-Based Generative Models
Flow Matching has emerged as a powerful framework for learning continuous transformations between distributions, enabling high-fidelity generative modeling. This work introduces Symmetrical Flow Matching (SymmFlow), a new formulation that unifies semantic segmentation, classification, and image generation within a single model. Using a symmetric learning objective, SymmFlow models forward and reverse transformations jointly, ensuring bi-directional consistency, while preserving sufficient entropy for generative diversity. A new training objective is introduced to explicitly retain semantic information across flows, featuring efficient sampling while preserving semantic structure, allowing for one-step segmentation and classification without iterative refinement. Unlike previous approaches that impose strict one-to-one mapping between masks and images, SymmFlow generalizes to flexible conditioning, supporting both pixel-level and image-level class labels. Experimental results on various benchmarks demonstrate that SymmFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance on semantic image synthesis, obtaining FID scores of 11.9 on CelebAMask-HQ and 7.0 on COCO-Stuff with only 25 inference steps. Additionally, it delivers competitive results on semantic segmentation and shows promising capabilities in classification tasks. The code will be publicly available.
Multisample Flow Matching: Straightening Flows with Minibatch Couplings
Simulation-free methods for training continuous-time generative models construct probability paths that go between noise distributions and individual data samples. Recent works, such as Flow Matching, derived paths that are optimal for each data sample. However, these algorithms rely on independent data and noise samples, and do not exploit underlying structure in the data distribution for constructing probability paths. We propose Multisample Flow Matching, a more general framework that uses non-trivial couplings between data and noise samples while satisfying the correct marginal constraints. At very small overhead costs, this generalization allows us to (i) reduce gradient variance during training, (ii) obtain straighter flows for the learned vector field, which allows us to generate high-quality samples using fewer function evaluations, and (iii) obtain transport maps with lower cost in high dimensions, which has applications beyond generative modeling. Importantly, we do so in a completely simulation-free manner with a simple minimization objective. We show that our proposed methods improve sample consistency on downsampled ImageNet data sets, and lead to better low-cost sample generation.
Improving and generalizing flow-based generative models with minibatch optimal transport
Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) are an attractive generative modeling technique, but they have been held back by limitations in their simulation-based maximum likelihood training. We introduce the generalized conditional flow matching (CFM) technique, a family of simulation-free training objectives for CNFs. CFM features a stable regression objective like that used to train the stochastic flow in diffusion models but enjoys the efficient inference of deterministic flow models. In contrast to both diffusion models and prior CNF training algorithms, CFM does not require the source distribution to be Gaussian or require evaluation of its density. A variant of our objective is optimal transport CFM (OT-CFM), which creates simpler flows that are more stable to train and lead to faster inference, as evaluated in our experiments. Furthermore, we show that when the true OT plan is available, our OT-CFM method approximates dynamic OT. Training CNFs with CFM improves results on a variety of conditional and unconditional generation tasks, such as inferring single cell dynamics, unsupervised image translation, and Schr\"odinger bridge inference.
A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation
Recent work has shown that optical flow estimation can be formulated as a supervised learning task and can be successfully solved with convolutional networks. Training of the so-called FlowNet was enabled by a large synthetically generated dataset. The present paper extends the concept of optical flow estimation via convolutional networks to disparity and scene flow estimation. To this end, we propose three synthetic stereo video datasets with sufficient realism, variation, and size to successfully train large networks. Our datasets are the first large-scale datasets to enable training and evaluating scene flow methods. Besides the datasets, we present a convolutional network for real-time disparity estimation that provides state-of-the-art results. By combining a flow and disparity estimation network and training it jointly, we demonstrate the first scene flow estimation with a convolutional network.
Let the Flows Tell: Solving Graph Combinatorial Optimization Problems with GFlowNets
Combinatorial optimization (CO) problems are often NP-hard and thus out of reach for exact algorithms, making them a tempting domain to apply machine learning methods. The highly structured constraints in these problems can hinder either optimization or sampling directly in the solution space. On the other hand, GFlowNets have recently emerged as a powerful machinery to efficiently sample from composite unnormalized densities sequentially and have the potential to amortize such solution-searching processes in CO, as well as generate diverse solution candidates. In this paper, we design Markov decision processes (MDPs) for different combinatorial problems and propose to train conditional GFlowNets to sample from the solution space. Efficient training techniques are also developed to benefit long-range credit assignment. Through extensive experiments on a variety of different CO tasks with synthetic and realistic data, we demonstrate that GFlowNet policies can efficiently find high-quality solutions.
SplatFlow: Multi-View Rectified Flow Model for 3D Gaussian Splatting Synthesis
Text-based generation and editing of 3D scenes hold significant potential for streamlining content creation through intuitive user interactions. While recent advances leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for high-fidelity and real-time rendering, existing methods are often specialized and task-focused, lacking a unified framework for both generation and editing. In this paper, we introduce SplatFlow, a comprehensive framework that addresses this gap by enabling direct 3DGS generation and editing. SplatFlow comprises two main components: a multi-view rectified flow (RF) model and a Gaussian Splatting Decoder (GSDecoder). The multi-view RF model operates in latent space, generating multi-view images, depths, and camera poses simultaneously, conditioned on text prompts, thus addressing challenges like diverse scene scales and complex camera trajectories in real-world settings. Then, the GSDecoder efficiently translates these latent outputs into 3DGS representations through a feed-forward 3DGS method. Leveraging training-free inversion and inpainting techniques, SplatFlow enables seamless 3DGS editing and supports a broad range of 3D tasks-including object editing, novel view synthesis, and camera pose estimation-within a unified framework without requiring additional complex pipelines. We validate SplatFlow's capabilities on the MVImgNet and DL3DV-7K datasets, demonstrating its versatility and effectiveness in various 3D generation, editing, and inpainting-based tasks.
RoPECraft: Training-Free Motion Transfer with Trajectory-Guided RoPE Optimization on Diffusion Transformers
We propose RoPECraft, a training-free video motion transfer method for diffusion transformers that operates solely by modifying their rotary positional embeddings (RoPE). We first extract dense optical flow from a reference video, and utilize the resulting motion offsets to warp the complex-exponential tensors of RoPE, effectively encoding motion into the generation process. These embeddings are then further optimized during denoising time steps via trajectory alignment between the predicted and target velocities using a flow-matching objective. To keep the output faithful to the text prompt and prevent duplicate generations, we incorporate a regularization term based on the phase components of the reference video's Fourier transform, projecting the phase angles onto a smooth manifold to suppress high-frequency artifacts. Experiments on benchmarks reveal that RoPECraft outperforms all recently published methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Gumbel-Softmax Flow Matching with Straight-Through Guidance for Controllable Biological Sequence Generation
Flow matching in the continuous simplex has emerged as a promising strategy for DNA sequence design, but struggles to scale to higher simplex dimensions required for peptide and protein generation. We introduce Gumbel-Softmax Flow and Score Matching, a generative framework on the simplex based on a novel Gumbel-Softmax interpolant with a time-dependent temperature. Using this interpolant, we introduce Gumbel-Softmax Flow Matching by deriving a parameterized velocity field that transports from smooth categorical distributions to distributions concentrated at a single vertex of the simplex. We alternatively present Gumbel-Softmax Score Matching which learns to regress the gradient of the probability density. Our framework enables high-quality, diverse generation and scales efficiently to higher-dimensional simplices. To enable training-free guidance, we propose Straight-Through Guided Flows (STGFlow), a classifier-based guidance method that leverages straight-through estimators to steer the unconditional velocity field toward optimal vertices of the simplex. STGFlow enables efficient inference-time guidance using classifiers pre-trained on clean sequences, and can be used with any discrete flow method. Together, these components form a robust framework for controllable de novo sequence generation. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in conditional DNA promoter design, sequence-only protein generation, and target-binding peptide design for rare disease treatment.
I-Max: Maximize the Resolution Potential of Pre-trained Rectified Flow Transformers with Projected Flow
Rectified Flow Transformers (RFTs) offer superior training and inference efficiency, making them likely the most viable direction for scaling up diffusion models. However, progress in generation resolution has been relatively slow due to data quality and training costs. Tuning-free resolution extrapolation presents an alternative, but current methods often reduce generative stability, limiting practical application. In this paper, we review existing resolution extrapolation methods and introduce the I-Max framework to maximize the resolution potential of Text-to-Image RFTs. I-Max features: (i) a novel Projected Flow strategy for stable extrapolation and (ii) an advanced inference toolkit for generalizing model knowledge to higher resolutions. Experiments with Lumina-Next-2K and Flux.1-dev demonstrate I-Max's ability to enhance stability in resolution extrapolation and show that it can bring image detail emergence and artifact correction, confirming the practical value of tuning-free resolution extrapolation.
Bayesian Flow Is All You Need to Sample Out-of-Distribution Chemical Spaces
Generating novel molecules with higher properties than the training space, namely the out-of-distribution generation, is important for {de~novo} drug design. However, it is not easy for distribution learning-based models, for example diffusion models, to solve this challenge as these methods are designed to fit the distribution of training data as close as possible. In this paper, we show that Bayesian flow network is capable of effortlessly generating high quality out-of-distribution samples that meet several scenarios. We introduce a semi-autoregressive training/sampling method that helps to enhance the model performance and surpass the state-of-the-art models.
Removing Cost Volumes from Optical Flow Estimators
Cost volumes are used in every modern optical flow estimator, but due to their computational and space complexity, they are often a limiting factor regarding both processing speed and the resolution of input frames. Motivated by our empirical observation that cost volumes lose their importance once all other network parts of, e.g., a RAFT-based pipeline have been sufficiently trained, we introduce a training strategy that allows removing the cost volume from optical flow estimators throughout training. This leads to significantly improved inference speed and reduced memory requirements. Using our training strategy, we create three different models covering different compute budgets. Our most accurate model reaches state-of-the-art accuracy while being 1.2times faster and having a 6times lower memory footprint than comparable models; our fastest model is capable of processing Full HD frames at 20,FPS using only 500,MB of GPU memory.
Towards Understanding and Improving GFlowNet Training
Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are a family of algorithms that learn a generative policy to sample discrete objects x with non-negative reward R(x). Learning objectives guarantee the GFlowNet samples x from the target distribution p^*(x) propto R(x) when loss is globally minimized over all states or trajectories, but it is unclear how well they perform with practical limits on training resources. We introduce an efficient evaluation strategy to compare the learned sampling distribution to the target reward distribution. As flows can be underdetermined given training data, we clarify the importance of learned flows to generalization and matching p^*(x) in practice. We investigate how to learn better flows, and propose (i) prioritized replay training of high-reward x, (ii) relative edge flow policy parametrization, and (iii) a novel guided trajectory balance objective, and show how it can solve a substructure credit assignment problem. We substantially improve sample efficiency on biochemical design tasks.
NANO3D: A Training-Free Approach for Efficient 3D Editing Without Masks
3D object editing is essential for interactive content creation in gaming, animation, and robotics, yet current approaches remain inefficient, inconsistent, and often fail to preserve unedited regions. Most methods rely on editing multi-view renderings followed by reconstruction, which introduces artifacts and limits practicality. To address these challenges, we propose Nano3D, a training-free framework for precise and coherent 3D object editing without masks. Nano3D integrates FlowEdit into TRELLIS to perform localized edits guided by front-view renderings, and further introduces region-aware merging strategies, Voxel/Slat-Merge, which adaptively preserve structural fidelity by ensuring consistency between edited and unedited areas. Experiments demonstrate that Nano3D achieves superior 3D consistency and visual quality compared with existing methods. Based on this framework, we construct the first large-scale 3D editing datasets Nano3D-Edit-100k, which contains over 100,000 high-quality 3D editing pairs. This work addresses long-standing challenges in both algorithm design and data availability, significantly improving the generality and reliability of 3D editing, and laying the groundwork for the development of feed-forward 3D editing models. Project Page:https://jamesyjl.github.io/Nano3D
Color Transfer with Modulated Flows
In this work, we introduce Modulated Flows (ModFlows), a novel approach for color transfer between images based on rectified flows. The primary goal of the color transfer is to adjust the colors of a target image to match the color distribution of a reference image. Our technique is based on optimal transport and executes color transfer as an invertible transformation within the RGB color space. The ModFlows utilizes the bijective property of flows, enabling us to introduce a common intermediate color distribution and build a dataset of rectified flows. We train an encoder on this dataset to predict the weights of a rectified model for new images. After training on a set of optimal transport plans, our approach can generate plans for new pairs of distributions without additional fine-tuning. We additionally show that the trained encoder provides an image embedding, associated only with its color style. The presented method is capable of processing 4K images and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of content and style similarity. Our source code is available at https://github.com/maria-larchenko/modflows
Drax: Speech Recognition with Discrete Flow Matching
Diffusion and flow-based non-autoregressive (NAR) models have shown strong promise in large language modeling, however, their potential for automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains largely unexplored. We propose Drax, a discrete flow matching framework for ASR that enables efficient parallel decoding. To better align training with inference, we construct an audio-conditioned probability path that guides the model through trajectories resembling likely intermediate inference errors, rather than direct random noise to target transitions. Our theoretical analysis links the generalization gap to divergences between training and inference occupancies, controlled by cumulative velocity errors, thereby motivating our design choice. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach attains recognition accuracy on par with state-of-the-art speech models while offering improved accuracy-efficiency trade-offs, highlighting discrete flow matching as a promising direction for advancing NAR ASR.
Adversarial Flow Models
We present adversarial flow models, a class of generative models that unifies adversarial models and flow models. Our method supports native one-step or multi-step generation and is trained using the adversarial objective. Unlike traditional GANs, where the generator learns an arbitrary transport plan between the noise and the data distributions, our generator learns a deterministic noise-to-data mapping, which is the same optimal transport as in flow-matching models. This significantly stabilizes adversarial training. Also, unlike consistency-based methods, our model directly learns one-step or few-step generation without needing to learn the intermediate timesteps of the probability flow for propagation. This saves model capacity, reduces training iterations, and avoids error accumulation. Under the same 1NFE setting on ImageNet-256px, our B/2 model approaches the performance of consistency-based XL/2 models, while our XL/2 model creates a new best FID of 2.38. We additionally show the possibility of end-to-end training of 56-layer and 112-layer models through depth repetition without any intermediate supervision, and achieve FIDs of 2.08 and 1.94 using a single forward pass, surpassing their 2NFE and 4NFE counterparts.
Taming Multimodal Joint Training for High-Quality Video-to-Audio Synthesis
We propose to synthesize high-quality and synchronized audio, given video and optional text conditions, using a novel multimodal joint training framework MMAudio. In contrast to single-modality training conditioned on (limited) video data only, MMAudio is jointly trained with larger-scale, readily available text-audio data to learn to generate semantically aligned high-quality audio samples. Additionally, we improve audio-visual synchrony with a conditional synchronization module that aligns video conditions with audio latents at the frame level. Trained with a flow matching objective, MMAudio achieves new video-to-audio state-of-the-art among public models in terms of audio quality, semantic alignment, and audio-visual synchronization, while having a low inference time (1.23s to generate an 8s clip) and just 157M parameters. MMAudio also achieves surprisingly competitive performance in text-to-audio generation, showing that joint training does not hinder single-modality performance. Code and demo are available at: https://hkchengrex.github.io/MMAudio
Steering Rectified Flow Models in the Vector Field for Controlled Image Generation
Diffusion models (DMs) excel in photorealism, image editing, and solving inverse problems, aided by classifier-free guidance and image inversion techniques. However, rectified flow models (RFMs) remain underexplored for these tasks. Existing DM-based methods often require additional training, lack generalization to pretrained latent models, underperform, and demand significant computational resources due to extensive backpropagation through ODE solvers and inversion processes. In this work, we first develop a theoretical and empirical understanding of the vector field dynamics of RFMs in efficiently guiding the denoising trajectory. Our findings reveal that we can navigate the vector field in a deterministic and gradient-free manner. Utilizing this property, we propose FlowChef, which leverages the vector field to steer the denoising trajectory for controlled image generation tasks, facilitated by gradient skipping. FlowChef is a unified framework for controlled image generation that, for the first time, simultaneously addresses classifier guidance, linear inverse problems, and image editing without the need for extra training, inversion, or intensive backpropagation. Finally, we perform extensive evaluations and show that FlowChef significantly outperforms baselines in terms of performance, memory, and time requirements, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Project Page: https://flowchef.github.io.
NeuFlow v2: High-Efficiency Optical Flow Estimation on Edge Devices
Real-time high-accuracy optical flow estimation is crucial for various real-world applications. While recent learning-based optical flow methods have achieved high accuracy, they often come with significant computational costs. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient optical flow method that balances high accuracy with reduced computational demands. Building upon NeuFlow v1, we introduce new components including a much more light-weight backbone and a fast refinement module. Both these modules help in keeping the computational demands light while providing close to state of the art accuracy. Compares to other state of the art methods, our model achieves a 10x-70x speedup while maintaining comparable performance on both synthetic and real-world data. It is capable of running at over 20 FPS on 512x384 resolution images on a Jetson Orin Nano. The full training and evaluation code is available at https://github.com/neufieldrobotics/NeuFlow_v2.
DiG-Flow: Discrepancy-Guided Flow Matching for Robust VLA Models
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models trained with flow matching have demonstrated impressive capabilities on robotic manipulation tasks. However, their performance often degrades under distribution shift and on complex multi-step tasks, suggesting that the learned representations may not robustly capture task-relevant semantics. We introduce DiG-Flow, a principled framework that enhances VLA robustness through geometric regularization. Our key insight is that the distributional discrepancy between observation and action embeddings provides a meaningful geometric signal: lower transport cost indicates compatible representations, while higher cost suggests potential misalignment. DiG-Flow computes a discrepancy measure between empirical distributions of observation and action embeddings, maps it to a modulation weight via a monotone function, and applies residual updates to the observation embeddings before flow matching. Crucially, this intervention operates at the representation level without modifying the flow matching path or target vector field. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that discrepancy-guided training provably decreases the training objective, and that guided inference refinement converges with contraction. Empirically, DiG-Flow integrates into existing VLA architectures with negligible overhead and consistently improves performance, with particularly pronounced gains on complex multi-step tasks and under limited training data.
Align Your Tangent: Training Better Consistency Models via Manifold-Aligned Tangents
With diffusion and flow matching models achieving state-of-the-art generating performance, the interest of the community now turned to reducing the inference time without sacrificing sample quality. Consistency Models (CMs), which are trained to be consistent on diffusion or probability flow ordinary differential equation (PF-ODE) trajectories, enable one or two-step flow or diffusion sampling. However, CMs typically require prolonged training with large batch sizes to obtain competitive sample quality. In this paper, we examine the training dynamics of CMs near convergence and discover that CM tangents -- CM output update directions -- are quite oscillatory, in the sense that they move parallel to the data manifold, not towards the manifold. To mitigate oscillatory tangents, we propose a new loss function, called the manifold feature distance (MFD), which provides manifold-aligned tangents that point toward the data manifold. Consequently, our method -- dubbed Align Your Tangent (AYT) -- can accelerate CM training by orders of magnitude and even out-perform the learned perceptual image patch similarity metric (LPIPS). Furthermore, we find that our loss enables training with extremely small batch sizes without compromising sample quality. Code: https://github.com/1202kbs/AYT
ThermalGen: Style-Disentangled Flow-Based Generative Models for RGB-to-Thermal Image Translation
Paired RGB-thermal data is crucial for visual-thermal sensor fusion and cross-modality tasks, including important applications such as multi-modal image alignment and retrieval. However, the scarcity of synchronized and calibrated RGB-thermal image pairs presents a major obstacle to progress in these areas. To overcome this challenge, RGB-to-Thermal (RGB-T) image translation has emerged as a promising solution, enabling the synthesis of thermal images from abundant RGB datasets for training purposes. In this study, we propose ThermalGen, an adaptive flow-based generative model for RGB-T image translation, incorporating an RGB image conditioning architecture and a style-disentangled mechanism. To support large-scale training, we curated eight public satellite-aerial, aerial, and ground RGB-T paired datasets, and introduced three new large-scale satellite-aerial RGB-T datasets--DJI-day, Bosonplus-day, and Bosonplus-night--captured across diverse times, sensor types, and geographic regions. Extensive evaluations across multiple RGB-T benchmarks demonstrate that ThermalGen achieves comparable or superior translation performance compared to existing GAN-based and diffusion-based methods. To our knowledge, ThermalGen is the first RGB-T image translation model capable of synthesizing thermal images that reflect significant variations in viewpoints, sensor characteristics, and environmental conditions. Project page: http://xjh19971.github.io/ThermalGen
PeRFlow: Piecewise Rectified Flow as Universal Plug-and-Play Accelerator
We present Piecewise Rectified Flow (PeRFlow), a flow-based method for accelerating diffusion models. PeRFlow divides the sampling process of generative flows into several time windows and straightens the trajectories in each interval via the reflow operation, thereby approaching piecewise linear flows. PeRFlow achieves superior performance in a few-step generation. Moreover, through dedicated parameterizations, the obtained PeRFlow models show advantageous transfer ability, serving as universal plug-and-play accelerators that are compatible with various workflows based on the pre-trained diffusion models. The implementations of training and inference are fully open-sourced. https://github.com/magic-research/piecewise-rectified-flow
FUDOKI: Discrete Flow-based Unified Understanding and Generation via Kinetic-Optimal Velocities
The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed the emergence of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that unify visual understanding and image generation within a single framework. However, most existing MLLMs rely on autoregressive (AR) architectures, which impose inherent limitations on future development, such as the raster-scan order in image generation and restricted reasoning abilities in causal context modeling. In this work, we challenge the dominance of AR-based approaches by introducing FUDOKI, a unified multimodal model purely based on discrete flow matching, as an alternative to conventional AR paradigms. By leveraging metric-induced probability paths with kinetic optimal velocities, our framework goes beyond the previous masking-based corruption process, enabling iterative refinement with self-correction capability and richer bidirectional context integration during generation. To mitigate the high cost of training from scratch, we initialize FUDOKI from pre-trained AR-based MLLMs and adaptively transition to the discrete flow matching paradigm. Experimental results show that FUDOKI achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art AR-based MLLMs across both visual understanding and image generation tasks, highlighting its potential as a foundation for next-generation unified multimodal models. Furthermore, we show that applying test-time scaling techniques to FUDOKI yields significant performance gains, further underscoring its promise for future enhancement through reinforcement learning.
Bayesian Prompt Flow Learning for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection
Recently, vision-language models (e.g. CLIP) have demonstrated remarkable performance in zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD). By leveraging auxiliary data during training, these models can directly perform cross-category anomaly detection on target datasets, such as detecting defects on industrial product surfaces or identifying tumors in organ tissues. Existing approaches typically construct text prompts through either manual design or the optimization of learnable prompt vectors. However, these methods face several challenges: 1) handcrafted prompts require extensive expert knowledge and trial-and-error; 2) single-form learnable prompts struggle to capture complex anomaly semantics; and 3) an unconstrained prompt space limits generalization to unseen categories. To address these issues, we propose Bayesian Prompt Flow Learning (Bayes-PFL), which models the prompt space as a learnable probability distribution from a Bayesian perspective. Specifically, a prompt flow module is designed to learn both image-specific and image-agnostic distributions, which are jointly utilized to regularize the text prompt space and improve the model's generalization on unseen categories. These learned distributions are then sampled to generate diverse text prompts, effectively covering the prompt space. Additionally, a residual cross-model attention (RCA) module is introduced to better align dynamic text embeddings with fine-grained image features. Extensive experiments on 15 industrial and medical datasets demonstrate our method's superior performance. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaozhen228/Bayes-PFL.
Gaussian-Flow: 4D Reconstruction with Dynamic 3D Gaussian Particle
We introduce Gaussian-Flow, a novel point-based approach for fast dynamic scene reconstruction and real-time rendering from both multi-view and monocular videos. In contrast to the prevalent NeRF-based approaches hampered by slow training and rendering speeds, our approach harnesses recent advancements in point-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Specifically, a novel Dual-Domain Deformation Model (DDDM) is proposed to explicitly model attribute deformations of each Gaussian point, where the time-dependent residual of each attribute is captured by a polynomial fitting in the time domain, and a Fourier series fitting in the frequency domain. The proposed DDDM is capable of modeling complex scene deformations across long video footage, eliminating the need for training separate 3DGS for each frame or introducing an additional implicit neural field to model 3D dynamics. Moreover, the explicit deformation modeling for discretized Gaussian points ensures ultra-fast training and rendering of a 4D scene, which is comparable to the original 3DGS designed for static 3D reconstruction. Our proposed approach showcases a substantial efficiency improvement, achieving a 5times faster training speed compared to the per-frame 3DGS modeling. In addition, quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed Gaussian-Flow significantly outperforms previous leading methods in novel view rendering quality. Project page: https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Gaussian-Flow
Flow Matching Meets PDEs: A Unified Framework for Physics-Constrained Generation
Generative machine learning methods, such as diffusion models and flow matching, have shown great potential in modeling complex system behaviors and building efficient surrogate models. However, these methods typically learn the underlying physics implicitly from data. We propose Physics-Based Flow Matching (PBFM), a novel generative framework that explicitly embeds physical constraints, both PDE residuals and algebraic relations, into the flow matching objective. We also introduce temporal unrolling at training time that improves the accuracy of the final, noise-free sample prediction. Our method jointly minimizes the flow matching loss and the physics-based residual loss without requiring hyperparameter tuning of their relative weights. Additionally, we analyze the role of the minimum noise level, sigma_{min}, in the context of physical constraints and evaluate a stochastic sampling strategy that helps to reduce physical residuals. Through extensive benchmarks on three representative PDE problems, we show that our approach yields up to an 8times more accurate physical residuals compared to FM, while clearly outperforming existing algorithms in terms of distributional accuracy. PBFM thus provides a principled and efficient framework for surrogate modeling, uncertainty quantification, and accelerated simulation in physics and engineering applications.
Contrastive Flow Matching
Unconditional flow-matching trains diffusion models to transport samples from a source distribution to a target distribution by enforcing that the flows between sample pairs are unique. However, in conditional settings (e.g., class-conditioned models), this uniqueness is no longer guaranteed--flows from different conditions may overlap, leading to more ambiguous generations. We introduce Contrastive Flow Matching, an extension to the flow matching objective that explicitly enforces uniqueness across all conditional flows, enhancing condition separation. Our approach adds a contrastive objective that maximizes dissimilarities between predicted flows from arbitrary sample pairs. We validate Contrastive Flow Matching by conducting extensive experiments across varying model architectures on both class-conditioned (ImageNet-1k) and text-to-image (CC3M) benchmarks. Notably, we find that training models with Contrastive Flow Matching (1) improves training speed by a factor of up to 9x, (2) requires up to 5x fewer de-noising steps and (3) lowers FID by up to 8.9 compared to training the same models with flow matching. We release our code at: https://github.com/gstoica27/DeltaFM.git.
Pretraining Generative Flow Networks with Inexpensive Rewards for Molecular Graph Generation
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) have recently emerged as a suitable framework for generating diverse and high-quality molecular structures by learning from rewards treated as unnormalized distributions. Previous works in this framework often restrict exploration by using predefined molecular fragments as building blocks, limiting the chemical space that can be accessed. In this work, we introduce Atomic GFlowNets (A-GFNs), a foundational generative model leveraging individual atoms as building blocks to explore drug-like chemical space more comprehensively. We propose an unsupervised pre-training approach using drug-like molecule datasets, which teaches A-GFNs about inexpensive yet informative molecular descriptors such as drug-likeliness, topological polar surface area, and synthetic accessibility scores. These properties serve as proxy rewards, guiding A-GFNs towards regions of chemical space that exhibit desirable pharmacological properties. We further implement a goal-conditioned finetuning process, which adapts A-GFNs to optimize for specific target properties. In this work, we pretrain A-GFN on a subset of ZINC dataset, and by employing robust evaluation metrics we show the effectiveness of our approach when compared to other relevant baseline methods for a wide range of drug design tasks. The code is accessible at https://github.com/diamondspark/AGFN.
Dual-Flow: Transferable Multi-Target, Instance-Agnostic Attacks via In-the-wild Cascading Flow Optimization
Adversarial attacks are widely used to evaluate model robustness, and in black-box scenarios, the transferability of these attacks becomes crucial. Existing generator-based attacks have excellent generalization and transferability due to their instance-agnostic nature. However, when training generators for multi-target tasks, the success rate of transfer attacks is relatively low due to the limitations of the model's capacity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Dual-Flow framework for multi-target instance-agnostic adversarial attacks, utilizing Cascading Distribution Shift Training to develop an adversarial velocity function. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dual-Flow significantly improves transferability over previous multi-target generative attacks. For example, it increases the success rate from Inception-v3 to ResNet-152 by 34.58%. Furthermore, our attack method shows substantially stronger robustness against defense mechanisms, such as adversarially trained models.
Conditional Image-to-Video Generation with Latent Flow Diffusion Models
Conditional image-to-video (cI2V) generation aims to synthesize a new plausible video starting from an image (e.g., a person's face) and a condition (e.g., an action class label like smile). The key challenge of the cI2V task lies in the simultaneous generation of realistic spatial appearance and temporal dynamics corresponding to the given image and condition. In this paper, we propose an approach for cI2V using novel latent flow diffusion models (LFDM) that synthesize an optical flow sequence in the latent space based on the given condition to warp the given image. Compared to previous direct-synthesis-based works, our proposed LFDM can better synthesize spatial details and temporal motion by fully utilizing the spatial content of the given image and warping it in the latent space according to the generated temporally-coherent flow. The training of LFDM consists of two separate stages: (1) an unsupervised learning stage to train a latent flow auto-encoder for spatial content generation, including a flow predictor to estimate latent flow between pairs of video frames, and (2) a conditional learning stage to train a 3D-UNet-based diffusion model (DM) for temporal latent flow generation. Unlike previous DMs operating in pixel space or latent feature space that couples spatial and temporal information, the DM in our LFDM only needs to learn a low-dimensional latent flow space for motion generation, thus being more computationally efficient. We conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets, where LFDM consistently outperforms prior arts. Furthermore, we show that LFDM can be easily adapted to new domains by simply finetuning the image decoder. Our code is available at https://github.com/nihaomiao/CVPR23_LFDM.
Weakly Supervised Label Learning Flows
Supervised learning usually requires a large amount of labelled data. However, attaining ground-truth labels is costly for many tasks. Alternatively, weakly supervised methods learn with cheap weak signals that only approximately label some data. Many existing weakly supervised learning methods learn a deterministic function that estimates labels given the input data and weak signals. In this paper, we develop label learning flows (LLF), a general framework for weakly supervised learning problems. Our method is a generative model based on normalizing flows. The main idea of LLF is to optimize the conditional likelihoods of all possible labelings of the data within a constrained space defined by weak signals. We develop a training method for LLF that trains the conditional flow inversely and avoids estimating the labels. Once a model is trained, we can make predictions with a sampling algorithm. We apply LLF to three weakly supervised learning problems. Experiment results show that our method outperforms many baselines we compare against.
Event-based Temporally Dense Optical Flow Estimation with Sequential Neural Networks
Prior works on event-based optical flow estimation have investigated several gradient-based learning methods to train neural networks for predicting optical flow. However, they do not utilize the fast data rate of event data streams and rely on a spatio-temporal representation constructed from a collection of events over a fixed period of time (often between two grayscale frames). As a result, optical flow is only evaluated at a frequency much lower than the rate data is produced by an event-based camera, leading to a temporally sparse optical flow estimation. To predict temporally dense optical flow, we cast the problem as a sequential learning task and propose a training methodology to train sequential networks for continuous prediction on an event stream. We propose two types of networks: one focused on performance and another focused on compute efficiency. We first train long-short term memory networks (LSTMs) on the DSEC dataset and demonstrated 10x temporally dense optical flow estimation over existing flow estimation approaches. The additional benefit of having a memory to draw long temporal correlations back in time results in a 19.7% improvement in flow prediction accuracy of LSTMs over similar networks with no memory elements. We subsequently show that the inherent recurrence of spiking neural networks (SNNs) enables them to learn and estimate temporally dense optical flow with 31.8% lesser parameters than LSTM, but with a slightly increased error. This demonstrates potential for energy-efficient implementation of fast optical flow prediction using SNNs.
FloWaveNet : A Generative Flow for Raw Audio
Most modern text-to-speech architectures use a WaveNet vocoder for synthesizing high-fidelity waveform audio, but there have been limitations, such as high inference time, in its practical application due to its ancestral sampling scheme. The recently suggested Parallel WaveNet and ClariNet have achieved real-time audio synthesis capability by incorporating inverse autoregressive flow for parallel sampling. However, these approaches require a two-stage training pipeline with a well-trained teacher network and can only produce natural sound by using probability distillation along with auxiliary loss terms. We propose FloWaveNet, a flow-based generative model for raw audio synthesis. FloWaveNet requires only a single-stage training procedure and a single maximum likelihood loss, without any additional auxiliary terms, and it is inherently parallel due to the characteristics of generative flow. The model can efficiently sample raw audio in real-time, with clarity comparable to previous two-stage parallel models. The code and samples for all models, including our FloWaveNet, are publicly available.
Flowing Backwards: Improving Normalizing Flows via Reverse Representation Alignment
Normalizing Flows (NFs) are a class of generative models distinguished by a mathematically invertible architecture, where the forward pass transforms data into a latent space for density estimation, and the reverse pass generates new samples from this space. This characteristic creates an intrinsic synergy between representation learning and data generation. However, the generative quality of standard NFs is limited by poor semantic representations from log-likelihood optimization. To remedy this, we propose a novel alignment strategy that creatively leverages the invertibility of NFs: instead of regularizing the forward pass, we align the intermediate features of the generative (reverse) pass with representations from a powerful vision foundation model, demonstrating superior effectiveness over naive alignment. We also introduce a novel training-free, test-time optimization algorithm for classification, which provides a more intrinsic evaluation of the NF's embedded semantic knowledge. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach accelerates the training of NFs by over 3.3times, while simultaneously delivering significant improvements in both generative quality and classification accuracy. New state-of-the-art results for NFs are established on ImageNet 64times64 and 256times256. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/FlowBack.
Rigid Body Flows for Sampling Molecular Crystal Structures
Normalizing flows (NF) are a class of powerful generative models that have gained popularity in recent years due to their ability to model complex distributions with high flexibility and expressiveness. In this work, we introduce a new type of normalizing flow that is tailored for modeling positions and orientations of multiple objects in three-dimensional space, such as molecules in a crystal. Our approach is based on two key ideas: first, we define smooth and expressive flows on the group of unit quaternions, which allows us to capture the continuous rotational motion of rigid bodies; second, we use the double cover property of unit quaternions to define a proper density on the rotation group. This ensures that our model can be trained using standard likelihood-based methods or variational inference with respect to a thermodynamic target density. We evaluate the method by training Boltzmann generators for two molecular examples, namely the multi-modal density of a tetrahedral system in an external field and the ice XI phase in the TIP4P water model. Our flows can be combined with flows operating on the internal degrees of freedom of molecules and constitute an important step towards the modeling of distributions of many interacting molecules.
Lifting Architectural Constraints of Injective Flows
Normalizing Flows explicitly maximize a full-dimensional likelihood on the training data. However, real data is typically only supported on a lower-dimensional manifold leading the model to expend significant compute on modeling noise. Injective Flows fix this by jointly learning a manifold and the distribution on it. So far, they have been limited by restrictive architectures and/or high computational cost. We lift both constraints by a new efficient estimator for the maximum likelihood loss, compatible with free-form bottleneck architectures. We further show that naively learning both the data manifold and the distribution on it can lead to divergent solutions, and use this insight to motivate a stable maximum likelihood training objective. We perform extensive experiments on toy, tabular and image data, demonstrating the competitive performance of the resulting model.
Normalizing Flows for Human Pose Anomaly Detection
Video anomaly detection is an ill-posed problem because it relies on many parameters such as appearance, pose, camera angle, background, and more. We distill the problem to anomaly detection of human pose, thus decreasing the risk of nuisance parameters such as appearance affecting the result. Focusing on pose alone also has the side benefit of reducing bias against distinct minority groups. Our model works directly on human pose graph sequences and is exceptionally lightweight (~1K parameters), capable of running on any machine able to run the pose estimation with negligible additional resources. We leverage the highly compact pose representation in a normalizing flows framework, which we extend to tackle the unique characteristics of spatio-temporal pose data and show its advantages in this use case. The algorithm is quite general and can handle training data of only normal examples as well as a supervised setting that consists of labeled normal and abnormal examples. We report state-of-the-art results on two anomaly detection benchmarks - the unsupervised ShanghaiTech dataset and the recent supervised UBnormal dataset.
Pyramidal Flow Matching for Efficient Video Generative Modeling
Video generation requires modeling a vast spatiotemporal space, which demands significant computational resources and data usage. To reduce the complexity, the prevailing approaches employ a cascaded architecture to avoid direct training with full resolution. Despite reducing computational demands, the separate optimization of each sub-stage hinders knowledge sharing and sacrifices flexibility. This work introduces a unified pyramidal flow matching algorithm. It reinterprets the original denoising trajectory as a series of pyramid stages, where only the final stage operates at the full resolution, thereby enabling more efficient video generative modeling. Through our sophisticated design, the flows of different pyramid stages can be interlinked to maintain continuity. Moreover, we craft autoregressive video generation with a temporal pyramid to compress the full-resolution history. The entire framework can be optimized in an end-to-end manner and with a single unified Diffusion Transformer (DiT). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method supports generating high-quality 5-second (up to 10-second) videos at 768p resolution and 24 FPS within 20.7k A100 GPU training hours. All code and models will be open-sourced at https://pyramid-flow.github.io.
SWE-Flow: Synthesizing Software Engineering Data in a Test-Driven Manner
We introduce **SWE-Flow**, a novel data synthesis framework grounded in Test-Driven Development (TDD). Unlike existing software engineering data that rely on human-submitted issues, **SWE-Flow** automatically infers incremental development steps directly from unit tests, which inherently encapsulate high-level requirements. The core of **SWE-Flow** is the construction of a Runtime Dependency Graph (RDG), which precisely captures function interactions, enabling the generation of a structured, step-by-step *development schedule*. At each step, **SWE-Flow** produces a partial codebase, the corresponding unit tests, and the necessary code modifications, resulting in fully verifiable TDD tasks. With this approach, we generated 16,061 training instances and 2,020 test instances from real-world GitHub projects, creating the **SWE-Flow-Eval** benchmark. Our experiments show that fine-tuning open model on this dataset significantly improves performance in TDD-based coding. To facilitate further research, we release all code, datasets, models, and Docker images at [Github](https://github.com/Hambaobao/SWE-Flow).
Making Flow-Matching-Based Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Laugh as You Like
Laughter is one of the most expressive and natural aspects of human speech, conveying emotions, social cues, and humor. However, most text-to-speech (TTS) systems lack the ability to produce realistic and appropriate laughter sounds, limiting their applications and user experience. While there have been prior works to generate natural laughter, they fell short in terms of controlling the timing and variety of the laughter to be generated. In this work, we propose ELaTE, a zero-shot TTS that can generate natural laughing speech of any speaker based on a short audio prompt with precise control of laughter timing and expression. Specifically, ELaTE works on the audio prompt to mimic the voice characteristic, the text prompt to indicate the contents of the generated speech, and the input to control the laughter expression, which can be either the start and end times of laughter, or the additional audio prompt that contains laughter to be mimicked. We develop our model based on the foundation of conditional flow-matching-based zero-shot TTS, and fine-tune it with frame-level representation from a laughter detector as additional conditioning. With a simple scheme to mix small-scale laughter-conditioned data with large-scale pre-training data, we demonstrate that a pre-trained zero-shot TTS model can be readily fine-tuned to generate natural laughter with precise controllability, without losing any quality of the pre-trained zero-shot TTS model. Through the evaluations, we show that ELaTE can generate laughing speech with significantly higher quality and controllability compared to conventional models. See https://aka.ms/elate/ for demo samples.
RectifID: Personalizing Rectified Flow with Anchored Classifier Guidance
Customizing diffusion models to generate identity-preserving images from user-provided reference images is an intriguing new problem. The prevalent approaches typically require training on extensive domain-specific images to achieve identity preservation, which lacks flexibility across different use cases. To address this issue, we exploit classifier guidance, a training-free technique that steers diffusion models using an existing classifier, for personalized image generation. Our study shows that based on a recent rectified flow framework, the major limitation of vanilla classifier guidance in requiring a special classifier can be resolved with a simple fixed-point solution, allowing flexible personalization with off-the-shelf image discriminators. Moreover, its solving procedure proves to be stable when anchored to a reference flow trajectory, with a convergence guarantee. The derived method is implemented on rectified flow with different off-the-shelf image discriminators, delivering advantageous personalization results for human faces, live subjects, and certain objects. Code is available at https://github.com/feifeiobama/RectifID.
FLATTEN: optical FLow-guided ATTENtion for consistent text-to-video editing
Text-to-video editing aims to edit the visual appearance of a source video conditional on textual prompts. A major challenge in this task is to ensure that all frames in the edited video are visually consistent. Most recent works apply advanced text-to-image diffusion models to this task by inflating 2D spatial attention in the U-Net into spatio-temporal attention. Although temporal context can be added through spatio-temporal attention, it may introduce some irrelevant information for each patch and therefore cause inconsistency in the edited video. In this paper, for the first time, we introduce optical flow into the attention module in the diffusion model's U-Net to address the inconsistency issue for text-to-video editing. Our method, FLATTEN, enforces the patches on the same flow path across different frames to attend to each other in the attention module, thus improving the visual consistency in the edited videos. Additionally, our method is training-free and can be seamlessly integrated into any diffusion-based text-to-video editing methods and improve their visual consistency. Experiment results on existing text-to-video editing benchmarks show that our proposed method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance. In particular, our method excels in maintaining the visual consistency in the edited videos.
The Surprising Effectiveness of Diffusion Models for Optical Flow and Monocular Depth Estimation
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have transformed image generation with their impressive fidelity and diversity. We show that they also excel in estimating optical flow and monocular depth, surprisingly, without task-specific architectures and loss functions that are predominant for these tasks. Compared to the point estimates of conventional regression-based methods, diffusion models also enable Monte Carlo inference, e.g., capturing uncertainty and ambiguity in flow and depth. With self-supervised pre-training, the combined use of synthetic and real data for supervised training, and technical innovations (infilling and step-unrolled denoising diffusion training) to handle noisy-incomplete training data, and a simple form of coarse-to-fine refinement, one can train state-of-the-art diffusion models for depth and optical flow estimation. Extensive experiments focus on quantitative performance against benchmarks, ablations, and the model's ability to capture uncertainty and multimodality, and impute missing values. Our model, DDVM (Denoising Diffusion Vision Model), obtains a state-of-the-art relative depth error of 0.074 on the indoor NYU benchmark and an Fl-all outlier rate of 3.26\% on the KITTI optical flow benchmark, about 25\% better than the best published method. For an overview see https://diffusion-vision.github.io.
Deeply Supervised Flow-Based Generative Models
Flow based generative models have charted an impressive path across multiple visual generation tasks by adhering to a simple principle: learning velocity representations of a linear interpolant. However, we observe that training velocity solely from the final layer output underutilizes the rich inter layer representations, potentially impeding model convergence. To address this limitation, we introduce DeepFlow, a novel framework that enhances velocity representation through inter layer communication. DeepFlow partitions transformer layers into balanced branches with deep supervision and inserts a lightweight Velocity Refiner with Acceleration (VeRA) block between adjacent branches, which aligns the intermediate velocity features within transformer blocks. Powered by the improved deep supervision via the internal velocity alignment, DeepFlow converges 8 times faster on ImageNet with equivalent performance and further reduces FID by 2.6 while halving training time compared to previous flow based models without a classifier free guidance. DeepFlow also outperforms baselines in text to image generation tasks, as evidenced by evaluations on MSCOCO and zero shot GenEval.
A Bayesian Flow Network Framework for Chemistry Tasks
In this work, we introduce ChemBFN, a language model that handles chemistry tasks based on Bayesian flow networks working on discrete data. A new accuracy schedule is proposed to improve the sampling quality by significantly reducing the reconstruction loss. We show evidence that our method is appropriate for generating molecules with satisfied diversity even when a smaller number of sampling steps is used. A classifier-free guidance method is adapted for conditional generation. It is also worthwhile to point out that after generative training, our model can be fine-tuned on regression and classification tasks with the state-of-the-art performance, which opens the gate of building all-in-one models in a single module style. Our model has been open sourced at https://github.com/Augus1999/bayesian-flow-network-for-chemistry.
Dreamguider: Improved Training free Diffusion-based Conditional Generation
Diffusion models have emerged as a formidable tool for training-free conditional generation.However, a key hurdle in inference-time guidance techniques is the need for compute-heavy backpropagation through the diffusion network for estimating the guidance direction. Moreover, these techniques often require handcrafted parameter tuning on a case-by-case basis. Although some recent works have introduced minimal compute methods for linear inverse problems, a generic lightweight guidance solution to both linear and non-linear guidance problems is still missing. To this end, we propose Dreamguider, a method that enables inference-time guidance without compute-heavy backpropagation through the diffusion network. The key idea is to regulate the gradient flow through a time-varying factor. Moreover, we propose an empirical guidance scale that works for a wide variety of tasks, hence removing the need for handcrafted parameter tuning. We further introduce an effective lightweight augmentation strategy that significantly boosts the performance during inference-time guidance. We present experiments using Dreamguider on multiple tasks across multiple datasets and models to show the effectiveness of the proposed modules. To facilitate further research, we will make the code public after the review process.
Reflected Flow Matching
Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) learn an ordinary differential equation to transform prior samples into data. Flow matching (FM) has recently emerged as a simulation-free approach for training CNFs by regressing a velocity model towards the conditional velocity field. However, on constrained domains, the learned velocity model may lead to undesirable flows that result in highly unnatural samples, e.g., oversaturated images, due to both flow matching error and simulation error. To address this, we add a boundary constraint term to CNFs, which leads to reflected CNFs that keep trajectories within the constrained domains. We propose reflected flow matching (RFM) to train the velocity model in reflected CNFs by matching the conditional velocity fields in a simulation-free manner, similar to the vanilla FM. Moreover, the analytical form of conditional velocity fields in RFM avoids potentially biased approximations, making it superior to existing score-based generative models on constrained domains. We demonstrate that RFM achieves comparable or better results on standard image benchmarks and produces high-quality class-conditioned samples under high guidance weight.
Unified Generative Modeling of 3D Molecules via Bayesian Flow Networks
Advanced generative model (e.g., diffusion model) derived from simplified continuity assumptions of data distribution, though showing promising progress, has been difficult to apply directly to geometry generation applications due to the multi-modality and noise-sensitive nature of molecule geometry. This work introduces Geometric Bayesian Flow Networks (GeoBFN), which naturally fits molecule geometry by modeling diverse modalities in the differentiable parameter space of distributions. GeoBFN maintains the SE-(3) invariant density modeling property by incorporating equivariant inter-dependency modeling on parameters of distributions and unifying the probabilistic modeling of different modalities. Through optimized training and sampling techniques, we demonstrate that GeoBFN achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple 3D molecule generation benchmarks in terms of generation quality (90.87% molecule stability in QM9 and 85.6% atom stability in GEOM-DRUG. GeoBFN can also conduct sampling with any number of steps to reach an optimal trade-off between efficiency and quality (e.g., 20-times speedup without sacrificing performance).
Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers: Improving learning signals through partial trajectory optimization
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 processes to model approximate samples from these target densities. The main drawback of these approaches is that the training objective requires full trajectories to compute, resulting in sluggish credit assignment issues due to use of entire trajectories and a learning signal present only at the terminal time. In this work, we present Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers (DGFS), a sampling-based framework where the learning process can be tractably broken down into short partial trajectory segments, via parameterizing an additional "flow function". Our method takes inspiration from the theory developed for generative flow networks (GFlowNets), allowing us to make use of intermediate learning signals. Through various challenging experiments, we demonstrate that DGFS achieves more accurate estimates of the normalization constant than closely-related prior methods.
Consistency Trajectory Models: Learning Probability Flow ODE Trajectory of Diffusion
Consistency Models (CM) (Song et al., 2023) accelerate score-based diffusion model sampling at the cost of sample quality but lack a natural way to trade-off quality for speed. To address this limitation, we propose Consistency Trajectory Model (CTM), a generalization encompassing CM and score-based models as special cases. CTM trains a single neural network that can -- in a single forward pass -- output scores (i.e., gradients of log-density) and enables unrestricted traversal between any initial and final time along the Probability Flow Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) in a diffusion process. CTM enables the efficient combination of adversarial training and denoising score matching loss to enhance performance and achieves new state-of-the-art FIDs for single-step diffusion model sampling on CIFAR-10 (FID 1.73) and ImageNet at 64x64 resolution (FID 1.92). CTM also enables a new family of sampling schemes, both deterministic and stochastic, involving long jumps along the ODE solution trajectories. It consistently improves sample quality as computational budgets increase, avoiding the degradation seen in CM. Furthermore, unlike CM, CTM's access to the score function can streamline the adoption of established controllable/conditional generation methods from the diffusion community. This access also enables the computation of likelihood. The code is available at https://github.com/sony/ctm.
EMR-MSF: Self-Supervised Recurrent Monocular Scene Flow Exploiting Ego-Motion Rigidity
Self-supervised monocular scene flow estimation, aiming to understand both 3D structures and 3D motions from two temporally consecutive monocular images, has received increasing attention for its simple and economical sensor setup. However, the accuracy of current methods suffers from the bottleneck of less-efficient network architecture and lack of motion rigidity for regularization. In this paper, we propose a superior model named EMR-MSF by borrowing the advantages of network architecture design under the scope of supervised learning. We further impose explicit and robust geometric constraints with an elaborately constructed ego-motion aggregation module where a rigidity soft mask is proposed to filter out dynamic regions for stable ego-motion estimation using static regions. Moreover, we propose a motion consistency loss along with a mask regularization loss to fully exploit static regions. Several efficient training strategies are integrated including a gradient detachment technique and an enhanced view synthesis process for better performance. Our proposed method outperforms the previous self-supervised works by a large margin and catches up to the performance of supervised methods. On the KITTI scene flow benchmark, our approach improves the SF-all metric of the state-of-the-art self-supervised monocular method by 44% and demonstrates superior performance across sub-tasks including depth and visual odometry, amongst other self-supervised single-task or multi-task methods.
Pseudo Flow Consistency for Self-Supervised 6D Object Pose Estimation
Most self-supervised 6D object pose estimation methods can only work with additional depth information or rely on the accurate annotation of 2D segmentation masks, limiting their application range. In this paper, we propose a 6D object pose estimation method that can be trained with pure RGB images without any auxiliary information. We first obtain a rough pose initialization from networks trained on synthetic images rendered from the target's 3D mesh. Then, we introduce a refinement strategy leveraging the geometry constraint in synthetic-to-real image pairs from multiple different views. We formulate this geometry constraint as pixel-level flow consistency between the training images with dynamically generated pseudo labels. We evaluate our method on three challenging datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised methods significantly, with neither 2D annotations nor additional depth images.
OmniFlow: Human Omnidirectional Optical Flow
Optical flow is the motion of a pixel between at least two consecutive video frames and can be estimated through an end-to-end trainable convolutional neural network. To this end, large training datasets are required to improve the accuracy of optical flow estimation. Our paper presents OmniFlow: a new synthetic omnidirectional human optical flow dataset. Based on a rendering engine we create a naturalistic 3D indoor environment with textured rooms, characters, actions, objects, illumination and motion blur where all components of the environment are shuffled during the data capturing process. The simulation has as output rendered images of household activities and the corresponding forward and backward optical flow. To verify the data for training volumetric correspondence networks for optical flow estimation we train different subsets of the data and test on OmniFlow with and without Test-Time-Augmentation. As a result we have generated 23,653 image pairs and corresponding forward and backward optical flow. Our dataset can be downloaded from: https://mytuc.org/byfs
Flowtron: an Autoregressive Flow-based Generative Network for Text-to-Speech Synthesis
In this paper we propose Flowtron: an autoregressive flow-based generative network for text-to-speech synthesis with control over speech variation and style transfer. Flowtron borrows insights from IAF and revamps Tacotron in order to provide high-quality and expressive mel-spectrogram synthesis. Flowtron is optimized by maximizing the likelihood of the training data, which makes training simple and stable. Flowtron learns an invertible mapping of data to a latent space that can be manipulated to control many aspects of speech synthesis (pitch, tone, speech rate, cadence, accent). Our mean opinion scores (MOS) show that Flowtron matches state-of-the-art TTS models in terms of speech quality. In addition, we provide results on control of speech variation, interpolation between samples and style transfer between speakers seen and unseen during training. Code and pre-trained models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/NVIDIA/flowtron
