The paper introduces Contrastive Noise Alignment (CNA), a training-time method for generative flow models that dynamically aligns Gaussian noise with data samples using a cross-modal InfoNCE objective. By modeling noise as an interacting particle system and regularizing with angular entropy and radial norm penalties, CNA reduces arbitrary data-noise couplings and flow curvature. Empirical results show that CNA improves generation quality, lowering FID by over 50% for few-step pixel-space generation compared to standard rectified flow and outperforming optimal transport baselines by at least 24%.
By Lennart Wittke, Vinicius Azevedo
arXiv:2607. 19332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models have undergone many generations of evolution, from VAEs/GANs to diffusion/flow matching.
By Chirag Vashist, Ke Li
The paper introduces Cumulative Marginal Matching (CMM), a new objective for training few‑step diffusion and flow‑matching models. CMM treats flow‑matching as a sequence of intermediate marginal distributions and directly optimizes the cumulative Wasserstein‑2 discrepancy between the base and few‑step models across the entire trajectory. It derives a tractable surrogate for this objective, shows that Shortcut‑CSL is a first‑order approximation of CMM, and reports improved generation quality on standard benchmarks under the same training budget.
By Paribesh Regmi, Rui Li
The paper introduces Noise Policy Optimization (NPO), a method for aligning few-step generative models with black-box reward signals. NPO learns an amortized flow policy that transforms initial Gaussian noise into a reward-tilted distribution, allowing the pretrained generator to produce higher-reward outputs without fine-tuning. The approach achieves superior reward-quality trade-offs across image, language, and protein generation tasks while drastically reducing inference cost compared to test-time search methods.
By Woocheol Shin, Taeyoung Yun, Jiwon Sung, Hyeongyu Kang, Jeongmin Park, Jaewoo Lee, Kyuil Sim, Dohyun Kim, Yutong He, Jinkyoo Park
Generative models have undergone many generations of evolution, from VAEs/GANs to diffusion/flow matching. Along the way, the underlying techniques have become more complicated and various beliefs about what drives strong empirical performance have taken hold.
arXiv:2606. 04092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow matching models learn to transport samples from a simple prior distribution to a complex data distribution.
By Shimon Malnick, Matan Rusanovsky, Ohad Fried, Shai Avidan
arXiv:2607. 00535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-step flow-map generators, such as consistency models and MeanFlow, accelerate sampling by directly learning long-range transport maps between noise and data.
By Zhiqi Li, Wen Zhang, Bo Zhu
arXiv:2607. 12171v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In rectified-flow-based generative models, the neural network can be trained to predict two different targets, such as the instantaneous velocity or the data endpoint, to perform denoising.
By Xu Han, Jiajing Hu, Li-Ping Liu
arXiv:2605.05736v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vector quantization (VQ) with autoregressive (AR) token modeling is a widely adopted and highly competitive paradigm for time-series generation. Ho...
By Wei Li, Shibo Feng, Pengcheng Wu, Xingyu Gao, Min Wu, Peilin Zhao
The paper introduces data‑space iteration, a few‑step generation framework that eliminates the need for a fixed probability‑flow discretization. By refining predictions directly in data space with a shared generator, each iteration is trained to produce the best possible sample within its capacity. Experiments on class‑conditional ImageNet 256×256 show that data‑space iteration outperforms standard discretization baselines and matches or improves upon schedule‑searched variants without schedule‑specific training.
By Shanchuan Lin, Yansong Peng, Fu-Yun Wang, Haoqi Fan
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:2607. 26398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion and flow-based models benefit from simple regression losses, but inference incurs significant overhead because sampling requires integration.
By Mark Goldstein, Anshuk Uppal, Raghav Singhal, Aahlad Puli, Rajesh Ranganath