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Generative Modeling via Drifting (arxiv.org)
2 points by fabmilo 240 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: Instead of refining a picture step by step, this shifts its output toward real images during training, guided by a field that settles when they match—so generation takes one step. It beats usual multi-step generators on ImageNet at 256×256, with an image-quality score of 1.54 (lower is better).

Abstract

Generative modeling can be formulated as learning a mapping f such that its pushforward distribution matches the data distribution. The pushforward behavior can be carried out iteratively at inference time, for example in diffusion and flow-based models. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm called Drifting Models, which evolve the pushforward distribution during training and naturally admit one-step inference. We introduce a drifting field that governs the sample movement and achieves equilibrium when the distributions match. This leads to a training objective that allows the neural network optimizer to evolve the distribution. In experiments, our one-step generator achieves state-of-the-art results on ImageNet at 256 x 256 resolution, with an FID of 1.54 in latent space and 1.61 in pixel space. We hope that our work opens up new opportunities for high-quality one-step generation.

Mingyang Deng, He Li, Tianhong Li, Yilun Du, Kaiming He
arXiv:2602.04770 · cs.LG, cs.CV · submitted Feb 4, 2026 · updated Feb 6, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Project page: https://lambertae.github.io/projects/drifting/

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New generative modeling using a single inference step