Improving Progressive Generation with Decomposable Flow Matching

TL;DR

This paper introduces Decomposable Flow Matching (DFM), a simple multi-scale framework for progressive visual media generation that improves quality and convergence speed without complex architectures.

Contribution

DFM applies Flow Matching independently at each scale, enabling effective progressive generation with minimal modifications and architectural simplicity.

Findings

DFM achieves 35.2% improvement in FDD scores on ImageNet-1k 512px.

DFM outperforms prior multistage frameworks in visual quality.

DFM accelerates convergence when finetuning large models like FLUX.

Abstract

Generating high-dimensional visual modalities is a computationally intensive task. A common solution is progressive generation, where the outputs are synthesized in a coarse-to-fine spectral autoregressive manner. While diffusion models benefit from the coarse-to-fine nature of denoising, explicit multi-stage architectures are rarely adopted. These architectures have increased the complexity of the overall approach, introducing the need for a custom diffusion formulation, decomposition-dependent stage transitions, add-hoc samplers, or a model cascade. Our contribution, Decomposable Flow Matching (DFM), is a simple and effective framework for the progressive generation of visual media. DFM applies Flow Matching independently at each level of a user-defined multi-scale representation (such as Laplacian pyramid). As shown by our experiments, our approach improves visual quality for both images and videos, featuring superior results compared to prior multistage frameworks. On Imagenet-1k 512px, DFM achieves 35.2% improvements in FDD scores over the base architecture and 26.4% over the best-performing baseline, under the same training compute. When applied to finetuning of large models, such as FLUX, DFM shows faster convergence speed to the training distribution. Crucially, all these advantages are achieved with a single model, architectural simplicity, and minimal modifications to existing training pipelines.