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Autori principali: Tong, Shangyuan, Ma, Nanye, Xie, Saining, Jaakkola, Tommi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19428
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author Tong, Shangyuan
Ma, Nanye
Xie, Saining
Jaakkola, Tommi
author_facet Tong, Shangyuan
Ma, Nanye
Xie, Saining
Jaakkola, Tommi
contents State-of-the-art flow models achieve remarkable quality but require slow, iterative sampling. To accelerate this, flow maps can be distilled from pre-trained teachers, a procedure that conventionally requires sampling from an external dataset. We argue that this data-dependency introduces a fundamental risk of Teacher-Data Mismatch, as a static dataset may provide an incomplete or even misaligned representation of the teacher's full generative capabilities. This leads us to question whether this reliance on data is truly necessary for successful flow map distillation. In this work, we explore a data-free alternative that samples only from the prior distribution, a distribution the teacher is guaranteed to follow by construction, thereby circumventing the mismatch risk entirely. To demonstrate the practical viability of this philosophy, we introduce a principled framework that learns to predict the teacher's sampling path while actively correcting for its own compounding errors to ensure high fidelity. Our approach surpasses all data-based counterparts and establishes a new state-of-the-art by a significant margin. Specifically, distilling from SiT-XL/2+REPA, our method reaches an impressive FID of 1.45 on ImageNet 256x256, and 1.49 on ImageNet 512x512, both with only 1 sampling step. We hope our work establishes a more robust paradigm for accelerating generative models and motivates the broader adoption of flow map distillation without data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_19428
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Flow Map Distillation Without Data
Tong, Shangyuan
Ma, Nanye
Xie, Saining
Jaakkola, Tommi
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
State-of-the-art flow models achieve remarkable quality but require slow, iterative sampling. To accelerate this, flow maps can be distilled from pre-trained teachers, a procedure that conventionally requires sampling from an external dataset. We argue that this data-dependency introduces a fundamental risk of Teacher-Data Mismatch, as a static dataset may provide an incomplete or even misaligned representation of the teacher's full generative capabilities. This leads us to question whether this reliance on data is truly necessary for successful flow map distillation. In this work, we explore a data-free alternative that samples only from the prior distribution, a distribution the teacher is guaranteed to follow by construction, thereby circumventing the mismatch risk entirely. To demonstrate the practical viability of this philosophy, we introduce a principled framework that learns to predict the teacher's sampling path while actively correcting for its own compounding errors to ensure high fidelity. Our approach surpasses all data-based counterparts and establishes a new state-of-the-art by a significant margin. Specifically, distilling from SiT-XL/2+REPA, our method reaches an impressive FID of 1.45 on ImageNet 256x256, and 1.49 on ImageNet 512x512, both with only 1 sampling step. We hope our work establishes a more robust paradigm for accelerating generative models and motivates the broader adoption of flow map distillation without data.
title Flow Map Distillation Without Data
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19428