TFTF: Training-Free Targeted Flow for Conditional Sampling

📅 2026-02-13
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
📄 PDF

Technology Category

Computer Vision: Diffusion Models for VisionMachine Learning: Multimodal LearningSearch and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search

Application Category

Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for rankingUser Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: On-Device user modeling, personalization, and recommendationGraph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs
📝 Abstract
We propose a training-free conditional sampling method for flow matching models based on importance sampling. Because a na\"ive application of importance sampling suffers from weight degeneracy in high-dimensional settings, we modify and incorporate a resampling technique in sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) during intermediate stages of the generation process. To encourage generated samples to diverge along distinct trajectories, we derive a stochastic flow with adjustable noise strength to replace the deterministic flow at the intermediate stage. Our framework requires no additional training, while providing theoretical guarantees of asymptotic accuracy. Experimentally, our method significantly outperforms existing approaches on conditional sampling tasks for MNIST and CIFAR-10. We further demonstrate the applicability of our approach in higher-dimensional, multimodal settings through text-to-image generation experiments on CelebA-HQ.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

conditional sampling
flow matching
training-free
importance sampling
high-dimensional
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

training-free
flow matching
importance sampling
sequential Monte Carlo
conditional sampling
Q
Qianqian Qu
Zhili College, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
J
Jun S. Liu
Department of Statistics and Data Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; Department of Statistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA