提出一种无需配对的轻量级流匹配耦合方法,提升生成质量且计算高效。
One-Sided Quantile Coupling for Flow Matching

- 仅采样数据端,通过随机方向投影与高斯分位数映射构建源样本
- 在相同训练预算下,FID降低最多12.9%,优于基线与OT-CFM
- 无需解配对问题,适合大规模图像生成任务
流匹配通过回归从简单先验分布到目标数据分布的概率路径的速度场来训练连续时间生成模型。配对方式对优化和样本质量影响显著,但传统结构化配对依赖于批量运输或分配,其开销随批量大小至少呈二次增长。本文提出单侧分位数耦合流匹配(QC-FM):不需预采样两批数据,仅采样数据批次,并直接构造每对源样本。将数据沿少量随机正交方向投影后,将其秩映射至标准高斯分位数,剩余维度通过条件高斯采样完成。该构造每切片仅一维,无需成对代价矩阵或求解分配问题。我们证明,对每个采样帧,此耦合消除了所选切片上的不可约回归方差,使理想流在该处恰好为直线,同时保持采样先验不变——生成仍从标准高斯开始,训练源仅通过切片编码的拷贝拉变换偏离,其传输代价可被界定。训练时,对锚定子集应用QC,其余源槽用精确高斯样本填充,保留QC偏差的同时维持来自基线耦合的明确信号。在CIFAR-10、CelebA、FFHQ和ImageNet-64上,QC-FM在相同训练预算下优于基线,FID最高降低12.9%,且在所有四数据集上均超过OT-CFM。结果表明,保留投影秩结构是一种简单且可扩展的方式,可在不解决批量运输问题的前提下,向流匹配耦合注入有效几何偏置。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Flow Matching trains continuous-time generative models by regressing the velocity field of a probability path between a simple source distribution and a target data distribution. The coupling that pairs source and target samples strongly affects optimization and sample quality, but structured couplings typically rely on mini-batch transport or assignment procedures whose cost grows at least quadratically in batch size. We propose Quantile Coupling Flow Matching (QC-FM), a lightweight one-sided coupling: rather than matching two pre-sampled batches, it samples only the data batch and constructs each paired source directly. Data ranks projected along a small number of random orthogonal directions are mapped to Gaussian quantiles, and the latent code is completed in the orthogonal complement by conditional Gaussian sampling. The construction is one-dimensional per slice, so the coupling requires no pairwise cost matrix and no assignment to solve. We show that, for each drawn frame, this coupling eliminates the irreducible regression variance along every selected slice and makes the ideal flow exactly straight there, while leaving the sampling prior unchanged: generation still starts from the standard Gaussian, and the training source deviates from it only through the copula of the slice codes, whose transport cost we bound. For training, we apply QC to an anchor subset and complete the remaining source slots with exact Gaussian samples, retaining the QC bias while preserving an explicit signal from the Baseline coupling. Across CIFAR-10, CelebA, FFHQ, and ImageNet-64, QC-FM improves over the Baseline under matched training budgets, reducing FID by up to 12.9%, and outperforms OT-CFM on all four datasets. These results suggest that preserving projected rank structure is a simple and scalable way to inject useful geometric bias into FM couplings without solving a mini-batch transport problem.
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