Optimal Flow Matching: Learning Straight Trajectories in Just One Step

Abstract

Over the several recent years, there has been a boom in development of Flow Matching (FM) methods for generative modeling. One intriguing property pursued by the community is the ability to learn flows with straight trajectories which realize the Optimal Transport (OT) displacements. Straightness is crucial for the fast integration (inference) of the learned flow's paths. Unfortunately, most existing flow straightening methods are based on non-trivial iterative FM procedures which accumulate the error during training or exploit heuristics based on minibatch OT. To address these issues, we develop and theoretically justify the novel \textbf{Optimal Flow Matching} (OFM) approach which allows recovering the straight OT displacement for the quadratic transport in just one FM step. The main idea of our approach is the employment of vector field for FM which are parameterized by convex functions.