Title: AlphaFlow: Understanding and Improving MeanFlow Models
Primary area: generative models
Keywords: diffusion models, mean flows, mean flow models, few-step diffusion, one-step diffusion, generative models, imagenet

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 256×256 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). The source code and pre-trained checkpoints will be publicly released.

TL;DR: We analyze the recently proposed MeanFlow framework and generalize it AlphaFlow, which obtains new SotA for one/two-step generation on ImageNet 256x256.