Align Your Tangent: Training Better Consistency Models via Manifold-Aligned Tangents

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kim, Beomsu, Cha, Byunghee, Ye, Jong Chul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kim, Beomsu
Cha, Byunghee
Ye, Jong Chul
author_facet Kim, Beomsu
Cha, Byunghee
Ye, Jong Chul
contents With diffusion and flow matching models achieving state-of-the-art generating performance, the interest of the community now turned to reducing the inference time without sacrificing sample quality. Consistency Models (CMs), which are trained to be consistent on diffusion or probability flow ordinary differential equation (PF-ODE) trajectories, enable one or two-step flow or diffusion sampling. However, CMs typically require prolonged training with large batch sizes to obtain competitive sample quality. In this paper, we examine the training dynamics of CMs near convergence and discover that CM tangents -- CM output update directions -- are quite oscillatory, in the sense that they move parallel to the data manifold, not towards the manifold. To mitigate oscillatory tangents, we propose a new loss function, called the manifold feature distance (MFD), which provides manifold-aligned tangents that point toward the data manifold. Consequently, our method -- dubbed Align Your Tangent (AYT) -- can accelerate CM training by orders of magnitude and even out-perform the learned perceptual image patch similarity metric (LPIPS). Furthermore, we find that our loss enables training with extremely small batch sizes without compromising sample quality. Code: https://github.com/1202kbs/AYT
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_00658
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Align Your Tangent: Training Better Consistency Models via Manifold-Aligned Tangents
Kim, Beomsu
Cha, Byunghee
Ye, Jong Chul
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
With diffusion and flow matching models achieving state-of-the-art generating performance, the interest of the community now turned to reducing the inference time without sacrificing sample quality. Consistency Models (CMs), which are trained to be consistent on diffusion or probability flow ordinary differential equation (PF-ODE) trajectories, enable one or two-step flow or diffusion sampling. However, CMs typically require prolonged training with large batch sizes to obtain competitive sample quality. In this paper, we examine the training dynamics of CMs near convergence and discover that CM tangents -- CM output update directions -- are quite oscillatory, in the sense that they move parallel to the data manifold, not towards the manifold. To mitigate oscillatory tangents, we propose a new loss function, called the manifold feature distance (MFD), which provides manifold-aligned tangents that point toward the data manifold. Consequently, our method -- dubbed Align Your Tangent (AYT) -- can accelerate CM training by orders of magnitude and even out-perform the learned perceptual image patch similarity metric (LPIPS). Furthermore, we find that our loss enables training with extremely small batch sizes without compromising sample quality. Code: https://github.com/1202kbs/AYT
title Align Your Tangent: Training Better Consistency Models via Manifold-Aligned Tangents
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00658