Velocity Scheduled Flow Matching
2607.11442

Authors

Vitalii Bondar

Abstract

Flow matching trains a neural network to regress the conditional velocity along a linear interpolant between noise and data, and the number of network evaluations~(NFE) sets the cost of sampling. The straight-line interpolant carries an implicit choice: the sample moves at constant speed throughout the trajectory.

We relax this choice and introduce Velocity Scheduled Flow Matching~(VSFM), which replaces the conditional target $x_1 - x_0$ with $v(t)(x_1 - x_0)$ for any nonnegative profile $v:[0,1]\to\mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}$ satisfying $\int_0^1 v\,dt = 1$. We study six polynomial profiles drawn from motion planning.

The first use of VSFM is at inference time: a pretrained linear flow-matching model can be sampled under any admissible profile by integrating its ODE on a non-uniform $τ$-schedule, with no retraining and no additional computation; on CIFAR-10 this lowers FID by up to $19.8\%$. Training from scratch under a braking profile gives a further reduction of $17.4\%$ at $4$~NFE.

Both gains follow from the local truncation error of the Euler integrator on the induced grid.

Resources

Stay in the loop

Every AI paper that matters, free in your inbox daily.

Details

  • takara.ai
  • Custom AI and machine learning from the Frontier Research Team.
  • © 2026 takara.ai Ltd
  • Content is sourced from third-party publications.