AlphaFlow: Understanding and Improving MeanFlow Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20771v1
• Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2025 17:45:06 GMT
• Title: AlphaFlow: Understanding and Improving MeanFlow Models
• Authors: Huijie Zhang, Aliaksandr Siarohin, Willi Menapace, Michael Vasilkovsky, Sergey Tulyakov, Qing Qu, Ivan Skorokhodov,
• Abstract summary: We show that the MeanFlow objective naturally decomposes into two parts: trajectory flow matching and trajectory consistency.<n>Motivated by these insights, we introduce $alpha$-Flow, a broad family of objectives that unifies trajectory flow matching, Shortcut Model, and MeanFlow.<n>When trained from scratch on class-conditional ImageNet-1K 256x256 with vanilla DiT backbones, $alpha$-Flow consistently outperforms MeanFlow across scales and settings.
• Score: 74.64465762009475
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: MeanFlow has recently emerged as a powerful framework for few-step generative modeling trained from scratch, but its success is not yet fully understood. In this work, we show that the MeanFlow objective naturally decomposes into two parts: trajectory flow matching and trajectory consistency. Through gradient analysis, we find that these terms are strongly negatively correlated, causing optimization conflict and slow convergence. Motivated by these insights, we introduce $\alpha$-Flow, a broad family of objectives that unifies trajectory flow matching, Shortcut Model, and MeanFlow under one formulation. By adopting a curriculum strategy that smoothly anneals from trajectory flow matching to MeanFlow, $\alpha$-Flow disentangles the conflicting objectives, and achieves better convergence. When trained from scratch on class-conditional ImageNet-1K 256x256 with vanilla DiT backbones, $\alpha$-Flow consistently outperforms MeanFlow across scales and settings. Our largest $\alpha$-Flow-XL/2+ model achieves new state-of-the-art results using vanilla DiT backbones, with FID scores of 2.58 (1-NFE) and 2.15 (2-NFE).

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