arXiv:2509.20952cs.LGcs.AI2025-09被引 2

flow matching在低噪声下会不稳定,新方法通过对比学习修复问题。

Flow Matching in the Low-Noise Regime: Pathologies and a Contrastive Remedy

  • 在低噪声时用对比学习替代速度回归,避免梯度爆炸。
  • 实验显示收敛更快,特征表示更稳定,尤其在低噪声阶段。
  • 适合关注生成质量与表征学习的从业者,尤其是做流模型研究者。

Flow matching 近来成为扩散模型的有力替代,提供连续时间生成建模与表征学习框架。然而我们发现该框架在低噪声状态下存在根本性不稳定性:当噪声趋近于零时,输入的微小扰动会导致速度目标剧烈变化,使学习问题的条件数发散。这种病态不仅减缓优化过程,还迫使编码器将有限的雅可比容量分配给噪声方向,从而损害语义表示。我们首次对这一现象——低噪声病理性(low-noise pathology)进行了理论分析,揭示其与流匹配目标结构的内在关联。基于此,我们提出局部对比流(Local Contrastive Flow, LCF),一种混合训练协议:在低噪声水平下以对比特征对齐取代直接速度回归,而在中高噪声水平下保留标准流匹配。实验证明,LCF不仅提升收敛速度,还显著稳定了表示质量。这些发现强调,要充分释放流匹配在生成与表征学习中的潜力,必须解决低噪声病理性问题。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Flow matching has recently emerged as a powerful alternative to diffusion models, providing a continuous-time formulation for generative modeling and representation learning. Yet, we show that this framework suffers from a fundamental instability in the low-noise regime. As noise levels approach zero, arbitrarily small perturbations in the input can induce large variations in the velocity target, causing the condition number of the learning problem to diverge. This ill-conditioning not only slows optimization but also forces the encoder to reallocate its limited Jacobian capacity toward noise directions, thereby degrading semantic representations. We provide the first theoretical analysis of this phenomenon, which we term the low-noise pathology, establishing its intrinsic link to the structure of the flow matching objective. Building on these insights, we propose Local Contrastive Flow (LCF), a hybrid training protocol that replaces direct velocity regression with contrastive feature alignment at small noise levels, while retaining standard flow matching at moderate and high noise. Empirically, LCF not only improves convergence speed but also stabilizes representation quality. Our findings highlight the critical importance of addressing low-noise pathologies to unlock the full potential of flow matching for both generation and representation learning.

流模型生成模型表征学习

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。