Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Geng, Zhengyang, Deng, Mingyang, Bai, Xingjian, Kolter, J. Zico, He, Kaiming
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Geng, Zhengyang
Deng, Mingyang
Bai, Xingjian
Kolter, J. Zico
He, Kaiming
author_facet Geng, Zhengyang
Deng, Mingyang
Bai, Xingjian
Kolter, J. Zico
He, Kaiming
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13447
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modeling
Geng, Zhengyang
Deng, Mingyang
Bai, Xingjian
Kolter, J. Zico
He, Kaiming
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
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.
title Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modeling
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13447