Generalization Bounds for Flow-matching Generative Models for Intrinsically Low-dimensional Data
stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.TH
Submitted: 2026-10-02
Updated: 2026-10-05
Code: https://github.com/saptarshic27/fmintrinsic
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Despite the remarkable empirical success of flow-matching models, their statistical generalization guarantees remain underdeveloped.
Terminology
Abstract
Despite the remarkable empirical success of flow-matching models, their statistical generalization guarantees remain underdeveloped. Existing analyses often impose restrictive assumptions on the estimated velocity field and yield convergence rates that fail to reflect the intrinsic low-dimensional structure common in real data, such as natural images and molecular geometries. In this work, we study the statistical generalization of flow-matching models for learning an unknown distribution P data from finitely many samples. We derive finite-sample error bounds on the learned generative distribution, measured in the Wasserstein- p distance, for all p at least 1. Specifically, given n i.i.d. samples from P data, we show that, for every d>d p(P data) and appropriately chosen network architectures and hyperparameters, the learned distribution FM satisfies W p(FM,P data) n-1/d+n-1/(2p) ((1/ξ)) 1/(2p) with probability at least 1-ξ, where d p(P data) denotes the Wasserstein- p dimension of the target measure. Our results demonstrate that flow matching naturally adapts to the intrinsic geometry of data and mitigates the curse of dimensionality, as the convergence exponent depends on the intrinsic rather than ambient dimension. These guarantees remain meaningful in high-dimensional regimes and provide a theoretical explanation for the empirical success of flow matching on structured data distributions under substantially more relaxed assumptions than those in existing analyses.
Sources
- Generative Modeling with Denoising Auto-Encoders and Langevin Sampling
- Generalization Properties of Score-matching Diffusion Models for Intrinsically Low-dimensional Data
- Convergence of Continuous Normalizing Flows for Learning Probability Distributions
- Flow Matching is Adaptive to Manifold Structures
- Stochastic Sampling from Deterministic Flow Models
Related papers
- Behavior of prediction performance metrics with rare events
- Optimal Estimation of Generic Dynamics by Path-Dependent Neural Jump ODEs
- A Posterior-Dynamics Framework for Imaging Inverse Problems with Pretrained Diffusion Priors
- Efficient quadratic entropy with distance sketches
- Embedding-Bias in Conditional Independence Testing
- From Log-Odds to Shapley Values: An Explanatory Geometry for the Weighted Naive Bayes Classifier