Title: Three Forms of Stochastic Injection for Improved Distribution-to-Distribution Generative Modeling
Primary area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)
Keywords: flow matching, generative modeling, AI for science, distribution learning, image translation

Abstract: Modeling transformations between arbitrary data distributions is a fundamental scientific challenge, arising in applications like drug discovery and evolutionary simulation. While flow matching offers a natural framework for this task, its use has thus far primarily focused on the noise-to-data setting, while its application in the general distribution-to-distribution setting is underexplored. We find that in the latter case, where the source is also a data distribution to be learned from limited samples, standard flow matching fails due to sparse supervision. To address this, we propose a simple and computationally efficient method that injects stochasticity into the training process by perturbing source samples and flow interpolants. On five diverse imaging tasks spanning biology, radiology, and astronomy, our method significantly improves generation quality, outperforming existing baselines by an average of 9 FID points. Our approach also reduces the transport cost between input and generated samples to better highlight the true effect of the transformation, making flow matching a more practical tool for simulating the diverse distribution transformations that arise in science.

TL;DR: we identify that flow matching in the distribution-to-distribution setting is sparsity-challenged and address this with stochastic injections