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Divergence-Suppressing Couplings for Rectified Flow

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The promise of Rectified Flow rests on producing self-generated couplings whose trajectories are straight, or nearly so. In practice, trajectories generated by the base flow model can bend and intertwine, and the resulting coupling inherits this distortion. In this paper, we identify that such trajectory entanglement is often associated with regions of nonzero divergence in the learned velocity field, where local expansion or contraction distorts trajectories and steers particles away from their ideal endpoints. We then propose divergence-suppressing couplings for Rectified Flow, an offline correction that attenuate the divergent component of the learned velocity during coupling generation. The correction is paid only once per coupling pair and amortized over training, so deployment runs plain Euler at identical wall-clock cost to standard Rectified Flow. Empirically, this offline modification yields consistent improvements on 2D synthetic benchmarks and on image generation.

Yimeng Min, Carla P. Gomes• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Image GenerationCelebA-64
FID3.02
103
Image GenerationCIFAR10 (train)
FID6.17
71
Distributional FidelityGaussian Mixture Model (GMM)
SWD0.501
21
Generative ModelingCheckerboard (held-out reference)
SWD0.1006
21
Synthetic Data Generationcheckerboard
Forbidden Cell Fraction2.71
21
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