Your GFlowNet Secretly Learns an Optimal Transport Plan
arXiv:2606. 06272v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a framework for sampling structured objects via stochastic trajectories in a directed graph.
arXiv:2606. 06272v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a framework for sampling structured objects via stochastic trajectories in a directed graph.
Many modern generative modeling methods, including diffusion models, normalizing flows, and flow matching, estimate transport maps or plans between distributions without explicitly targeting an optimal transport (OT) map. In applications like generative modeling, the transport cost itself is irrelevant, and this makes it natural to target maps which are more tractable from either a statistical or computational standpoint.
arXiv:2606. 30574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many modern generative modeling methods, including diffusion models, normalizing flows, and flow matching, estimate transport maps or plans between distributions without explicitly targeting an optimal transport (OT) map.
The paper introduces COFM, a framework for consistent optimal transport flow matching that uses partially input convex neural networks (PICNN) to parameterize the transport potential. By adding a Hamilton‑Jacobi residual to the training objective, COFM enforces dynamical consistency and supports both one‑step transport and multi‑step ODE sampling without costly inner optimization. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that COFM achieves competitive performance while reducing L^2‑UVP by over 2× and cutting computational time by about 9× compared to state‑of‑the‑art models.
arXiv:2511. 09465v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching approaches to generative modeling have shown promise in domains where the state space is continuous, such as image generation or protein folding & design, and discrete, exemplified by diffusion large language models.
The paper introduces the Variational Incompressible Optimal Transport (VIOT) operator, a generative neural operator that predicts divergence‑free velocity fields for incompressible density transport. VIOT combines a stream‑function representation, a regularized transport objective, and a Fourier Neural Operator backbone to amortize the solve across new source‑target pairs and grid resolutions. Experiments on 2D and 3D benchmarks show that VIOT produces full transport trajectories in seconds, achieving roughly a $10^4 imes$ speedup over per‑instance baselines that require hours of optimization.
The article surveys how diffusion and flow-based generative models learn rich visual representations and how these representations can be used to improve generation and other perception tasks. It introduces a three-tier framework that categorizes work into improving generative quality via representation learning, extracting representations for perception, and developing unified applications. The survey covers downstream tasks such as image classification, dense prediction, instance-level perception, and annotation-scarce scenarios, offering a taxonomy and highlighting future research directions.
Diffusion models and flow-based models have recently become the dominant paradigms in generative modeling, largely due to their ability to learn rich, multi-level visual representations through large-...
The paper introduces a new learning objective called trajectory balance for Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), aiming to improve credit assignment across long action sequences. It demonstrates that minimizing this objective yields a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution. Experiments on four domains show that trajectory balance enhances convergence, sample diversity, and robustness to long sequences and large action spaces.
arXiv:2606. 05327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow matching (FM) has emerged as a powerful framework for learning dynamic transport maps between two empirical distributions.
arXiv:2607. 19332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models have undergone many generations of evolution, from VAEs/GANs to diffusion/flow matching.
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.