Title: FACM: Flow-Anchored Consistency Models
Primary area: generative models
Keywords: Image Generation, Consistency Model

Abstract: Continuous-time Consistency Models (CMs) promise efficient few-step generation but face significant challenges with training instability. We argue this instability stems from a fundamental conflict: Training the network exclusively on a shortcut objective leads to the catastrophic forgetting of the instantaneous velocity field that defines the flow. Our solution is to explicitly anchor the model in the underlying flow, ensuring high trajectory fidelity during training. We introduce the Flow-Anchored Consistency Model (FACM), where a Flow Matching (FM) task serves as a dynamic anchor for the primary CM shortcut objective. Key to this Flow-Anchoring approach is a novel expanded time interval strategy that unifies optimization for a single model while decoupling the two tasks to ensure stable, architecturally-agnostic training. By distilling a pre-trained LightningDiT model, our method achieves a state-of-the-art FID of 1.32 with two steps (NFE=2) and 1.70 with just one step (NFE=1) on ImageNet 256x256. To address the challenge of scalability, we develop a memory-efficient Chain-JVP that resolves key incompatibilities with FSDP. This method allows us to scale FACM training on a 14B parameter model (Wan 2.2), accelerating its Text-to-Image inference from 2x40 to 8 steps. Our code and pretrained models will be available to the public.