Coreset-Induced Conditional Velocity Flow Matching

원문 초록

We propose Coreset-Induced Conditional Velocity Flow Matching (CCVFM), a generative model that augments hierarchical rectified flow with a data-informed source distribution. Standard flow matching regresses only the conditional mean of the velocity; hierarchical flow matching instead models the full conditional velocity law with a second, inner flow in velocity space, but this inner flow is asked to transport isotropic Gaussian noise to a multimodal target velocity distribution from scratch. Our key observation is that this inner source can be replaced by a closed-form surrogate built from a coreset of the target. CCVFM first compresses the target into weighted atoms using an entropic Sinkhorn coreset and lifts them to a Gaussian mixture. The induced conditional velocity law is then a closed-form Gaussian mixture that can be sampled without a learned neural sampler. A lightweight correction flow, trained from this surrogate source, then refines the remaining surrogate-to-target residual rather than learning an entire noise-to-data map. We prove that the surrogate transport cost equals the target-surrogate Wasserstein gap under an explicit compression assumption, whereas the noise-source analogue has a dimension-scale lower bound. We further characterize the conditional second moment of the training target when the source velocity is drawn from the surrogate law independently of the target velocity, and show that the part of it that depends on the source is small when the surrogate conditional law is close to the true conditional velocity law in mean and covariance. Empirically, on MNIST, CIFAR-10, ImageNet-32, and CelebA-HQ, the proposed method reaches competitive few-step generation under matched architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/ziwaa-se/CCVFM.