Daily Papers

In robot manipulation, robot learning has become a prevailing approach. However, generative models within this field face a fundamental trade-off between the slow, iterative sampling of diffusion models and the architectural constraints of faster Flow-based methods, which often rely on explicit consistency losses. To address these limitations, we introduce MP1, which pairs 3D point-cloud inputs with the MeanFlow paradigm to generate action trajectories in one network function evaluation (1-NFE). By directly learning the interval-averaged velocity via the "MeanFlow Identity", our policy avoids any additional consistency constraints. This formulation eliminates numerical ODE-solver errors during inference, yielding more precise trajectories. MP1 further incorporates CFG for improved trajectory controllability while retaining 1-NFE inference without reintroducing structural constraints. Because subtle scene-context variations are critical for robot learning, especially in few-shot learning, we introduce a lightweight Dispersive Loss that repels state embeddings during training, boosting generalization without slowing inference. We validate our method on the Adroit and Meta-World benchmarks, as well as in real-world scenarios. Experimental results show MP1 achieves superior average task success rates, outperforming DP3 by 10.2% and FlowPolicy by 7.3%. Its average inference time is only 6.8 ms-19x faster than DP3 and nearly 2x faster than FlowPolicy. Our code is available at https://github.com/LogSSim/MP1.git.

Multistep inference is a bottleneck for real-time generative speech enhancement because flow- and diffusion-based systems learn an instantaneous velocity field and therefore rely on iterative ordinary differential equation (ODE) solvers. We introduce MeanFlowSE, a conditional generative model that learns the average velocity over finite intervals along a trajectory. Using a Jacobian-vector product (JVP) to instantiate the MeanFlow identity, we derive a local training objective that directly supervises finite-interval displacement while remaining consistent with the instantaneous-field constraint on the diagonal. At inference, MeanFlowSE performs single-step generation via a backward-in-time displacement, removing the need for multistep solvers; an optional few-step variant offers additional refinement. On VoiceBank-DEMAND, the single-step model achieves strong intelligibility, fidelity, and perceptual quality with substantially lower computational cost than multistep baselines. The method requires no knowledge distillation or external teachers, providing an efficient, high-fidelity framework for real-time generative speech enhancement. The proposed method is open-sourced at https://github.com/liduojia1/MeanFlowSE.

One-step generative modeling seeks to generate high-quality data samples in a single function evaluation, significantly improving efficiency over traditional diffusion or flow-based models. In this work, we introduce Modular MeanFlow (MMF), a flexible and theoretically grounded approach for learning time-averaged velocity fields. Our method derives a family of loss functions based on a differential identity linking instantaneous and average velocities, and incorporates a gradient modulation mechanism that enables stable training without sacrificing expressiveness. We further propose a curriculum-style warmup schedule to smoothly transition from coarse supervision to fully differentiable training. The MMF formulation unifies and generalizes existing consistency-based and flow-matching methods, while avoiding expensive higher-order derivatives. Empirical results across image synthesis and trajectory modeling tasks demonstrate that MMF achieves competitive sample quality, robust convergence, and strong generalization, particularly under low-data or out-of-distribution settings.

We propose a principled and effective framework for one-step generative modeling. We introduce the notion of average velocity to characterize flow fields, in contrast to instantaneous velocity modeled by Flow Matching methods. A well-defined identity between average and instantaneous velocities is derived and used to guide neural network training. Our method, termed the MeanFlow model, is self-contained and requires no pre-training, distillation, or curriculum learning. MeanFlow demonstrates strong empirical performance: it achieves an FID of 3.43 with a single function evaluation (1-NFE) on ImageNet 256x256 trained from scratch, significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art one-step diffusion/flow models. Our study substantially narrows the gap between one-step diffusion/flow models and their multi-step predecessors, and we hope it will motivate future research to revisit the foundations of these powerful models.

MeanFlow (MF) is a diffusion-motivated generative model that enables efficient few-step generation by learning long jumps directly from noise to data. In practice, it is often used as a latent MF by leveraging the pre-trained Stable Diffusion variational autoencoder (SD-VAE) for high-dimensional data modeling. However, MF training remains computationally demanding and is often unstable. During inference, the SD-VAE decoder dominates the generation cost, and MF depends on complex guidance hyperparameters for class-conditional generation. In this work, we develop an efficient training and sampling scheme for MF in the latent space of a Representation Autoencoder (RAE), where a pre-trained vision encoder (e.g., DINO) provides semantically rich latents paired with a lightweight decoder. We observe that naive MF training in the RAE latent space suffers from severe gradient explosion. To stabilize and accelerate training, we adopt Consistency Mid-Training for trajectory-aware initialization and use a two-stage scheme: distillation from a pre-trained flow matching teacher to speed convergence and reduce variance, followed by an optional bootstrapping stage with a one-point velocity estimator to further reduce deviation from the oracle mean flow. This design removes the need for guidance, simplifies training configurations, and reduces computation in both training and sampling. Empirically, our method achieves a 1-step FID of 2.03, outperforming vanilla MF's 3.43, while reducing sampling GFLOPS by 38% and total training cost by 83% on ImageNet 256. We further scale our approach to ImageNet 512, achieving a competitive 1-step FID of 3.23 with the lowest GFLOPS among all baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/sony/mf-rae.

Generative models like Flow Matching have achieved state-of-the-art performance but are often hindered by a computationally expensive iterative sampling process. To address this, recent work has focused on few-step or one-step generation by learning the average velocity field, which directly maps noise to data. MeanFlow, a leading method in this area, learns this field by enforcing a differential identity that connects the average and instantaneous velocities. In this work, we argue that this differential formulation is a limiting special case of a more fundamental principle. We return to the first principles of average velocity and leverage the additivity property of definite integrals. This leads us to derive a novel, purely algebraic identity we term Interval Splitting Consistency. This identity establishes a self-referential relationship for the average velocity field across different time intervals without resorting to any differential operators. Based on this principle, we introduce SplitMeanFlow, a new training framework that enforces this algebraic consistency directly as a learning objective. We formally prove that the differential identity at the core of MeanFlow is recovered by taking the limit of our algebraic consistency as the interval split becomes infinitesimal. This establishes SplitMeanFlow as a direct and more general foundation for learning average velocity fields. From a practical standpoint, our algebraic approach is significantly more efficient, as it eliminates the need for JVP computations, resulting in simpler implementation, more stable training, and broader hardware compatibility. One-step and two-step SplitMeanFlow models have been successfully deployed in large-scale speech synthesis products (such as Doubao), achieving speedups of 20x.

MeanFlow has recently emerged as a powerful framework for few-step generative modeling trained from scratch, but its success is not yet fully understood. In this work, we show that the MeanFlow objective naturally decomposes into two parts: trajectory flow matching and trajectory consistency. Through gradient analysis, we find that these terms are strongly negatively correlated, causing optimization conflict and slow convergence. Motivated by these insights, we introduce alpha-Flow, a broad family of objectives that unifies trajectory flow matching, Shortcut Model, and MeanFlow under one formulation. By adopting a curriculum strategy that smoothly anneals from trajectory flow matching to MeanFlow, alpha-Flow disentangles the conflicting objectives, and achieves better convergence. When trained from scratch on class-conditional ImageNet-1K 256x256 with vanilla DiT backbones, alpha-Flow consistently outperforms MeanFlow across scales and settings. Our largest alpha-Flow-XL/2+ model achieves new state-of-the-art results using vanilla DiT backbones, with FID scores of 2.58 (1-NFE) and 2.15 (2-NFE).

Denoising generative models, such as diffusion and flow-based models, produce high-quality samples but require many denoising steps due to discretization error. Flow maps, which estimate the average velocity between timesteps, mitigate this error and enable faster sampling. However, their training typically demands architectural changes that limit compatibility with pretrained flow models. We introduce Decoupled MeanFlow, a simple decoding strategy that converts flow models into flow map models without architectural modifications. Our method conditions the final blocks of diffusion transformers on the subsequent timestep, allowing pretrained flow models to be directly repurposed as flow maps. Combined with enhanced training techniques, this design enables high-quality generation in as few as 1 to 4 steps. Notably, we find that training flow models and subsequently converting them is more efficient and effective than training flow maps from scratch. On ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512, our models attain 1-step FID of 2.16 and 2.12, respectively, surpassing prior art by a large margin. Furthermore, we achieve FID of 1.51 and 1.68 when increasing the steps to 4, which nearly matches the performance of flow models while delivering over 100x faster inference.

Recent developments in diffusion- and flow- based models have significantly advanced Text-to-Audio Generation (TTA). While achieving great synthesis quality and controllability, current TTA systems still suffer from slow inference speed, which significantly limits their practical applicability. This paper presents MeanAudio, a novel MeanFlow-based model tailored for fast and faithful text-to-audio generation. Built on a Flux-style latent transformer, MeanAudio regresses the average velocity field during training, enabling fast generation by mapping directly from the start to the endpoint of the flow trajectory. By incorporating classifier-free guidance (CFG) into the training target, MeanAudio incurs no additional cost in the guided sampling process. To further stabilize training, we propose an instantaneous-to-mean curriculum with flow field mix-up, which encourages the model to first learn the foundational instantaneous dynamics, and then gradually adapt to mean flows. This strategy proves critical for enhancing training efficiency and generation quality. Experimental results demonstrate that MeanAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-step audio generation. Specifically, it achieves a real time factor (RTF) of 0.013 on a single NVIDIA RTX 3090, yielding a 100x speedup over SOTA diffusion-based TTA systems. Moreover, MeanAudio also demonstrates strong performance in multi-step generation, enabling smooth and coherent transitions across successive synthesis steps.

Drawing on recent advancements in diffusion models for text-to-image generation, identity-preserved personalization has made significant progress in accurately capturing specific identities with just a single reference image. However, existing methods primarily integrate reference images within the text embedding space, leading to a complex entanglement of image and text information, which poses challenges for preserving both identity fidelity and semantic consistency. To tackle this challenge, we propose Infinite-ID, an ID-semantics decoupling paradigm for identity-preserved personalization. Specifically, we introduce identity-enhanced training, incorporating an additional image cross-attention module to capture sufficient ID information while deactivating the original text cross-attention module of the diffusion model. This ensures that the image stream faithfully represents the identity provided by the reference image while mitigating interference from textual input. Additionally, we introduce a feature interaction mechanism that combines a mixed attention module with an AdaIN-mean operation to seamlessly merge the two streams. This mechanism not only enhances the fidelity of identity and semantic consistency but also enables convenient control over the styles of the generated images. Extensive experimental results on both raw photo generation and style image generation demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.

The ability to synthesize personalized group photos and specify the positions of each identity offers immense creative potential. While such imagery can be visually appealing, it presents significant challenges for existing technologies. A persistent issue is identity (ID) leakage, where injected facial features interfere with one another, resulting in low face resemblance, incorrect positioning, and visual artifacts. Existing methods suffer from limitations such as the reliance on segmentation models, increased runtime, or a high probability of ID leakage. To address these challenges, we propose ID-Patch, a novel method that provides robust association between identities and 2D positions. Our approach generates an ID patch and ID embeddings from the same facial features: the ID patch is positioned on the conditional image for precise spatial control, while the ID embeddings integrate with text embeddings to ensure high resemblance. Experimental results demonstrate that ID-Patch surpasses baseline methods across metrics, such as face ID resemblance, ID-position association accuracy, and generation efficiency. Project Page is: https://byteaigc.github.io/ID-Patch/

The ability to learn multi-modal action distributions is indispensable for robotic manipulation policies to perform precise and robust control. Flow-based generative models have recently emerged as a promising solution to learning distributions of actions, offering one-step action generation and thus achieving much higher sampling efficiency compared to diffusion-based methods. However, existing flow-based policies suffer from representation collapse, the inability to distinguish similar visual representations, leading to failures in precise manipulation tasks. We propose DM1 (MeanFlow with Dispersive Regularization for One-Step Robotic Manipulation), a novel flow matching framework that integrates dispersive regularization into MeanFlow to prevent collapse while maintaining one-step efficiency. DM1 employs multiple dispersive regularization variants across different intermediate embedding layers, encouraging diverse representations across training batches without introducing additional network modules or specialized training procedures. Experiments on RoboMimic benchmarks show that DM1 achieves 20-40 times faster inference (0.07s vs. 2-3.5s) and improves success rates by 10-20 percentage points, with the Lift task reaching 99% success over 85% of the baseline. Real-robot deployment on a Franka Panda further validates that DM1 transfers effectively from simulation to the physical world. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage representation regularization to enable flow-based policies to achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation, establishing a simple yet powerful approach for efficient and robust manipulation.