arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Zero-Flow Encoders

arXiv:2602. 00797v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow-based methods have achieved significant success in various generative modeling tasks, capturing nuanced details within complex data distributions.

By Yakun Wang, Leyang Wang, Song Liu, Taiji Suzuki
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

From Core to Detail: Unsupervised Disentanglement with Entropy-Ordered Flows

The paper introduces entropy-ordered flows (EOFlows), a normalizing flow framework that adds an orthogonality regularizer on the decoder Jacobian to promote geometric disentanglement. EOFlows produce near‑orthogonal curvilinear coordinates whose features can be ranked by explained manifold entropy, providing a nonlinear analogue to PCA. The method yields an order‑of‑magnitude more stable features than existing approaches, categorizing them into global, local, and generic types, and can be trimmed to form an autoencoder with competitive rate‑distortion performance.

By Daniel Galperin, Ullrich K\"othe
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Beyond Random Couplings: Contrastive Noise Alignment in Generative Flows

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