Goto

Collaborating Authors

 flow matching






Diverging Flows: Detecting Extrapolations in Conditional Generation

Tsakonas, Constantinos, Ivaldi, Serena, Mouret, Jean-Baptiste

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The ability of Flow Matching (FM) to model complex conditional distributions has established it as the state-of-the-art for prediction tasks (e.g., robotics, weather forecasting). However, deployment in safety-critical settings is hindered by a critical extrapolation hazard: driven by smoothness biases, flow models yield plausible outputs even for off-manifold conditions, resulting in silent failures indistinguishable from valid predictions. In this work, we introduce Diverging Flows, a novel approach that enables a single model to simultaneously perform conditional generation and native extrapolation detection by structurally enforcing inefficient transport for off-manifold inputs. We evaluate our method on synthetic manifolds, cross-domain style transfer, and weather temperature forecasting, demonstrating that it achieves effective detection of extrapolations without compromising predictive fidelity or inference latency. These results establish Diverging Flows as a robust solution for trustworthy flow models, paving the way for reliable deployment in domains such as medicine, robotics, and climate science.


Generative Modeling of Discrete Data Using Geometric Latent Subspaces

Gonzalez-Alvarado, Daniel, Cassel, Jonas, Petra, Stefania, Schnörr, Christoph

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We introduce the use of latent subspaces in the exponential parameter space of product manifolds of categorial distributions, as a tool for learning generative models of discrete data. The low-dimensional latent space encodes statistical dependencies and removes redundant degrees of freedom among the categorial variables. We equip the parameter domain with a Riemannian geometry such that the spaces and distances are related by isometries which enables consistent flow matching. In particular, geodesics become straight lines which makes model training by flow matching effective. Empirical results demonstrate that reduced latent dimensions suffice to represent data for generative modeling.


Theoretical guarantees in KL for Diffusion Flow Matching

Neural Information Processing Systems

Flow Matching (FM) (also referred to as stochastic interpolants or rectified flows) stands out as a class of generative models that aims to bridge in finite time the target distribution $\nu^\star$ with an auxiliary distribution $\mu$ leveraging a fixed coupling $\pi$ and a bridge which can either be deterministic or stochastic. These two ingredients define a path measure which can then be approximated by learning the drift of its Markovian projection. The main contribution of this paper is to provide relatively mild assumption on $\nu^\star$, $\mu$ and $\pi$ to obtain non-asymptotics guarantees for Diffusion Flow Matching (DFM) models using as bridge the conditional distribution associated with the Brownian motion. More precisely, it establishes bounds on the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the target distribution and the one generated by such DFM models under moment conditions on the score of $\nu^\star$, $\mu$ and $\pi$, and a standard $\mathrm{L}^2$-drift-approximation error assumption.


Discrete Flow Matching

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite Flow Matching and diffusion models having emerged as powerful generative paradigms for continuous variables such as images and videos, their application to high-dimensional discrete data, such as language, is still limited. In this work, we present Discrete Flow Matching, a novel discrete flow paradigm designed specifically for generating discrete data. Discrete Flow Matching offers several key contributions: (i) it works with a general family of probability paths interpolating between source and target distributions; (ii) it allows for a generic formula for sampling from these probability paths using learned posteriors such as the probability denoiser ($x$-prediction) and noise-prediction ($\epsilon$-prediction); (iii) practically, focusing on specific probability paths defined with different schedulers improves generative perplexity compared to previous discrete diffusion and flow models; and (iv) by scaling Discrete Flow Matching models up to 1.7B parameters, we reach 6.7% Pass@1 and 13.4% Pass@10 on HumanEval and 6.7% Pass@1 and 20.6% Pass@10 on 1-shot MBPP coding benchmarks. Our approach is capable of generating high-quality discrete data in a non-autoregressive fashion, significantly closing the gap between autoregressive models and discrete flow models.


Equivariant flow matching

Neural Information Processing Systems

Normalizing flows are a class of deep generative models that are especially interesting for modeling probability distributions in physics, where the exact likelihood of flows allows reweighting to known target energy functions and computing unbiased observables. For instance, Boltzmann generators tackle the long-standing sampling problem in statistical physics by training flows to produce equilibrium samples of many-body systems such as small molecules and proteins. To build effective models for such systems, it is crucial to incorporate the symmetries of the target energy into the model, which can be achieved by equivariant continuous normalizing flows (CNFs). However, CNFs can be computationally expensive to train and generate samples from, which has hampered their scalability and practical application.In this paper, we introduce equivariant flow matching, a new training objective for equivariant CNFs that is based on the recently proposed optimal transport flow matching. Equivariant flow matching exploits the physical symmetries of the target energy for efficient, simulation-free training of equivariant CNFs.We demonstrate the effectiveness of flow matching on rotation and permutation invariant many-particle systems and a small molecule, alanine dipeptide, where for the first time we obtain a Boltzmann generator with significant sampling efficiency without relying on tailored internal coordinate featurization. Our results show that the equivariant flow matching objective yields flows with shorter integration paths, improved sampling efficiency, and higher scalability compared to existing methods.


Categorical Flow Matching on Statistical Manifolds

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce Statistical Flow Matching (SFM), a novel and mathematically rigorous flow-matching framework on the manifold of parameterized probability measures inspired by the results from information geometry. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the discrete generation problem by instantiating SFM on the manifold of categorical distributions whose geometric properties remain unexplored in previous discrete generative models. Utilizing the Fisher information metric, we equip the manifold with a Riemannian structure whose intrinsic geometries are effectively leveraged by following the shortest paths of geodesics. We develop an efficient training and sampling algorithm that overcomes numerical stability issues with a diffeomorphism between manifolds. Our distinctive geometric perspective of statistical manifolds allows us to apply optimal transport during training and interpret SFM as following the steepest direction of the natural gradient. Unlike previous models that rely on variational bounds for likelihood estimation, SFM enjoys the exact likelihood calculation for arbitrary probability measures. We manifest that SFM can learn more complex patterns on the statistical manifold where existing models often fail due to strong prior assumptions. Comprehensive experiments on real-world generative tasks ranging from image, text to biological domains further demonstrate that SFM achieves higher sampling quality and likelihood than other discrete diffusion or flow-based models.