The paper introduces DV-Flow, a flow‑matching framework that treats deterministic prediction as a parallel velocity component instead of embedding it within the generative process. This design stabilizes end‑to‑end training and unifies several existing methods as special cases, enabling direct comparison. Experiments on six real‑world datasets show that DV‑Flow consistently outperforms strong baselines in probabilistic time‑series forecasting.
arXiv:2601. 22495v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning flow matching models is a central challenge in settings with limited data, evolving distributions, or computational constraints.
By Gudrun Thorkelsdottir, Arindam Banerjee
arXiv:2606. 01081v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision-focused learning (DFL) trains predictive models by optimizing downstream decision quality rather than standalone prediction accuracy.
By Wyame Benslimane, Tinghan Ye, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Paul Grigas
The paper introduces DyProd-FM, a method for predictive flow matching that refits flow matching models on dyadic historical prefixes and selects among them using a sleeping Prod master. It achieves dynamic regret bounds of “~O(min{N_ω+1,1+√{TΩ}}) and ~O(min{N_μ+1,1+T^{1/3}V_μ^{2/3}}) in relative velocity risk variation Ω and target‑law variation V_μ, respectively, without requiring a drift budget. These bounds are shown to be optimal up to logarithmic factors for fixed, possibly nonconvex, neural classes.
By Aadithya Srikanth, Vaneet Aggarwal
Preconditioned Flow Matching introduces a precondition-then-match framework that transforms target distributions into more isotropic representations before training flow matching models. By reshaping intermediate distributions, the method improves conditioning, leading to better low-eigenvalue recovery and enhanced performance metrics such as FID, MMD, precision, and recall across Gaussian, Gaussian-mixture, and high-resolution image datasets. The approach is theoretically justified and empirically validated, with ablations showing gains stem from improved geometry rather than extra parameters.
By Shadab Ahamed, Eshed Gal, Md Shahriar Rahim Siddiqui, Simon Ghyselincks, Moshe Eliasof, Eldad Haber
arXiv:2605. 00155v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a central post-training tool for aligning large language models, but its training reward is only a learned proxy for true human utility.
By Yikai Wang, Shang Liu, Jose Blanchet
The paper introduces Flow Matching Policy Optimization with Mirror Descent and Entropy Constraints (FMER), a reinforcement learning framework that uses ODE-based flow matching to overcome limitations of SDE-based diffusion policies. FMER derives an analytic entropy objective to correct density distortion from a tanh transformation, establishes that minimizing an advantage-weighted conditional flow matching loss serves as a simulation-free surrogate for policy mirror descent, and dynamically tunes the mirror descent temperature to enforce a robust trust region. Experiments show FMER outperforms baselines on the sparse-reward FrankaKitchen task while remaining competitive on dense-reward MuJoCo benchmarks.
By Ting Gao, Stavros Orfanoudakis, Nan Lin, Winnie Daamen, Serge Hoogendoorn, Elvin Isufi
The paper investigates when conditional flow matching (CFM) can replace pointwise negative log-likelihood (NLL) calculations. It shows that for linear Gaussian paths, the endpoint NLL can be exactly decomposed into entropy, a weighted CFM objective, and residual terms, meaning CFM-only estimates are exact only when these residuals cancel. The study finds that ordinary CFM is generally not a pointwise NLL estimator, and even weighted variants may not fully eliminate bias, especially in training or on‑policy settings, with experiments confirming these theoretical insights.
By Yansen Han, Hongxin Sun, Tao Lin
The paper compares two strategies for contextual decision making: predict‑then‑optimize (PtO), which learns the conditional expected objective, and generate‑then‑optimize (GtO), which learns conditional uncertainty and optimizes over generated scenarios. It analyzes how the choice of learning target influences statistical accuracy and optimization tractability, showing that smoothness can compensate for GtO’s higher dimensionality. The study also discusses tradeoffs in convexity preservation, scenario‑wise convexity, and model flexibility, supported by synthetic experiments and a real case study.
By L. Jeff Hong, Weihuan Huang, Xinyao Li
arXiv:2507.06529v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful paradigm for optimizing expensive black-box functions. Traditional BO methods typically rely on separate h...
By Fengxue Zhang, Yuxin Chen
arXiv:2605. 00941v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Flow matching has become a leading framework for generative modeling, but quantifying the uncertainty of its samples remains an open problem.
By Jiarui Xing, Song Wang, Jian Wang
arXiv:2607. 09015v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study contextual bandit problems with correlated arms and access to surrogate reward signals produced by a machine learning model, motivated by applications such as large language model (LLM) routing.
By Ajay Narayanan Sridhar, Ronak Singh, Mehrdad Mahdavi, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan