arXiv Statistics ML By Lucas Ng, Georgios Batzolis, Mark Girolami

Compatible Likelihoods for Flow Matching on Manifolds

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The paper investigates flow matching on manifolds, focusing on the 1D flat torus. It identifies a failure mode caused by a property called compatibility, where a likelihood-based flow matching objective can be globally optimized by a velocity field that actually pushes samples away from the data distribution. The authors propose a new compatible objective built from an exponential family over endpoints, which restricts the velocity field to feasible values on compact manifolds and improves performance on high-dimensional product tori, geospatial benchmarks on the sphere, and a large human pose dataset.

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