Geometry-Aware Image Flow Matching
Summary
This paper introduces geometry-aware flow matching for natural images by treating them as points on a hypersphere, proposing SOT-CFM and SFM methods that improve generative modeling by leveraging the spherical structure of image data.
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Cached at: 05/26/26, 02:41 AM
Paper page - Geometry-Aware Image Flow Matching
Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.25294 TL;DR: Natural images live on a hypersphere — and treating them that way improves flow matching. Geometry-aware generative modeling has worked well on known manifolds (molecules, crystals, proteins), but natural images have stayed stuck in Euclidean space because nobody knew what manifold they lived on.
We show a surprisingly simple answer: their semantic content is almost entirely in the direction, not the norm. Projecting images (both RGB and VAE latents) onto a sphere of the dataset’s mean radius leaves them perceptually indistinguishable from the originals.
Building on this, we propose SOT-CFM (angular OT cost) and SFM (fully Riemannian flow matching on the sphere). SFM is, to our knowledge, the first successful application of a fully manifold-based generative framework to large-scale natural images.
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