README.md

Latent Flow Matching for MNIST

This repository provides a minimal example for training a flow matching model in a pretrained VAE's latent space to generate MNIST digits.

Approach

Training

Denote the data distribution as $P_1$, we first use a VAE encoder $E(x)$ to transform it into the latent distribution $P_z = E_\ast P_1$, where $\ast$ is the pushforward operation. We then prescribe a flow path between $z \sim P_z$ and $x_0 \sim P_0 = N(0,I)$, then regress on its velocity field $v_\theta(t,x)$ with the conditional flow matching (CFM) loss:

Here, $\psi_t(x_0|x_1)$ is the flow map associated with the prescribed flow. We pick it to be $\psi_t(x|y) = (1-(1-\sigma_{min})t)x + ty$.

Generation

We sample $z_0 \sim P_0$, integrate it through the learned flow $z_1 = z_0 + \int_0^1 v_\theta(t,z_t)dt$, then decode it with the VAE decoder $x_1 = D(z_1)$ to get the generated image. We parametrize $v_\theta(t,x)$ with a transformer and use a pretrained VAE for $E(x), D(x)$.

Results

VAE Reconstruction

As a sanity check, we can visualize the original and reconstructed digits to ensure the pretrained VAE can embed the images as intended.

Original	Reconstructed

Generated Digits

Epoch 1	Epoch 50	Epoch 100

Epoch 200	Epoch 300	Final

Dependencies

The code is tested to work on PyTorch 1.13 and CUDA 11.7. The other packages can be installed with

pip install -r requirements.txt

Experiments

Run:

python main.py

Attribution

The transformer code is adapted from the DiT official repository: https://github.com/facebookresearch/DiT

The flow matching model is adapted from https://github.com/gle-bellier/flow-matching/tree/main