Reflected Schr\"odinger Bridge Matching
About
Recent advances in generative modeling have enabled the efficient computation of Schr\"odinger bridges (SB) in high-dimensional settings by leveraging partially simulation-free training methods inspired by flow matching. However, these have not covered SBs with reflecting dynamics, a useful model choice with built-in guarantees that generated samples stay in the data domain. Existing alternatives for reflected SBs instead rely on more complex training based on forward--backward SDE theory, requiring expensive higher-order derivatives and sampling entire paths during training. In this article, we introduce a partially simulation-free framework that allows reflected SBs to be trained similarly to flow matching, using a new sampling method and regression target. We demonstrate our results by coupling pairs of well-known high-dimensional image datasets. Using reflected dynamics incurs negligible additional wall-clock time during both training and inference while maintaining or slightly improving generative performance.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image-to-Image Translation | EMNIST to MNIST (test) | FID8.23 | 13 | |
| Image-to-image synthesis | MNIST to EMNIST Direction: Π0 → Π1 (test) | MSD0.356 | 2 | |
| Image-to-image synthesis | AFHQ cat to wild Direction: Π0 → Π1 64 x 64 (test) | MSD0.084 | 2 | |
| Image-to-image synthesis | AFHQ wild to cat Direction: Π0 ← Π1 64 x 64 (test) | MSD0.082 | 2 |