SenseFlow: Scaling Distribution Matching for Flow-based Text-to-Image
  Distillation
Authors: name: Xingtong Ge; name: Xin Zhang; name: Tongda Xu; name: Yi Zhang; name: Xinjie Zhang; name: Yan Wang; name: Jun Zhang
Published: 2025-05-31 11:59:02

Abstract: The Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) has been successfully applied to
text-to-image diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion (SD) 1.5. However,
vanilla DMD suffers from convergence difficulties on large-scale flow-based
text-to-image models, such as SD 3.5 and FLUX. In this paper, we first analyze
the issues when applying vanilla DMD on large-scale models. Then, to overcome
the scalability challenge, we propose implicit distribution alignment (IDA) to
regularize the distance between the generator and fake distribution.
Furthermore, we propose intra-segment guidance (ISG) to relocate the timestep
importance distribution from the teacher model. With IDA alone, DMD converges
for SD 3.5; employing both IDA and ISG, DMD converges for SD 3.5 and FLUX.1
dev. Along with other improvements such as scaled up discriminator models, our
final model, dubbed SenseFlow, achieves superior performance in
distillation for both diffusion based text-to-image models such as SDXL, and
flow-matching models such as SD 3.5 Large and FLUX. The source code will be
avaliable at https://github.com/XingtongGe/SenseFlow.