On Variance Reduction in Learning Mean Flows

📰 ArXiv cs.AI

arXiv:2605.09235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: One-step generative modeling has emerged as a leading approach to amortize the inference cost of diffusion and flow-matching models. Among distillation-free methods, MeanFlow training is notoriously unstable, with non-decreasing loss and unbounded gradient variance. In this work, we establish a theory that attributes this pathology to a misuse of the conditional velocity field: it plays two distinct statistical roles in the loss, both as an unbia

Published 12 May 2026

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Title: On Variance Reduction in Learning Mean Flows

Abstract:
arXiv:2605.09235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: One-step generative modeling has emerged as a leading approach to amortize the inference cost of diffusion and flow-matching models. Among distillation-free methods, MeanFlow training is notoriously unstable, with non-decreasing loss and unbounded gradient variance. In this work, we establish a theory that attributes this pathology to a misuse of the conditional velocity field: it plays two distinct statistical roles in the loss, both as an unbia
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