flow matching能自适应数据流形结构,解释其在高维数据生成中的高效性。
Flow Matching is Adaptive to Manifold Structures
- 基于线性插值学习时变速度场,直接建模数据流形上的生成过程。
- 收敛速率接近最优,仅依赖内在维度,不受高维空间影响。
- 适用于图像、分子结构等流形支持的数据生成,理论解释更清晰。
流形匹配作为无模拟的生成建模方法,通过求解一个时间依赖速度场的常微分方程来生成样本,该速度场沿简单源分布(如标准正态)与目标数据分布之间的插值进行学习。尽管流形匹配在文本到图像生成、视频生成和分子结构生成等高维数据任务中表现优异,但现有理论分析通常假设目标分布具有光滑且满维的密度,未能解释其在流形支持分布下的有效性。本文针对目标分布支撑于光滑流形的情况,对线性插值下的流形匹配进行了理论分析。建立了学习速度场的非渐近收敛保证,并将估计误差传播至微分方程中,得到由流形匹配目标诱导的隐式密度估计器的统计一致性。所得收敛速率接近极小极大最优,仅依赖于内在维度,并反映流形与目标分布的光滑性。这些结果为流形匹配如何自适应数据内在几何结构、克服维度灾难提供了理论依据。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Flow matching has emerged as a simulation-free alternative to diffusion-based generative modeling, producing samples by solving an ODE whose time-dependent velocity field is learned along an interpolation between a simple source distribution (e.g., a standard normal) and a target data distribution. Flow-based methods often exhibit greater training stability and have achieved strong empirical performance in high-dimensional settings where data concentrate near a low-dimensional manifold, such as text-to-image synthesis, video generation, and molecular structure generation. Despite this success, existing theoretical analyses of flow matching assume target distributions with smooth, full-dimensional densities, leaving its effectiveness in manifold-supported settings largely unexplained. To this end, we theoretically analyze flow matching with linear interpolation when the target distribution is supported on a smooth manifold. We establish a non-asymptotic convergence guarantee for the learned velocity field, and then propagate this estimation error through the ODE to obtain statistical consistency of the implicit density estimator induced by the flow-matching objective. The resulting convergence rate is near minimax-optimal, depends only on the intrinsic dimension, and reflects the smoothness of both the manifold and the target distribution. Together, these results provide a principled explanation for how flow matching adapts to intrinsic data geometry and circumvents the curse of dimensionality.
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