Flow Matching — Straightening the Path from Noise to Image
Diffusion arrived at "follow a velocity field from noise to data" the hard way — through Markov chains, variational bounds, and reverse-time SDEs. Flow matching asks the question that framing begs: if generation is just transporting noise to data along a path, why inherit a curved path from a noising process you never actually cared about? Why not simply choose the path — and choose it straight? The answer now trains the frontier: Stable Diffusion 3, Flux, and much of the current video generation stack are flow-matching models.
If generation is transport from noise to data, why inherit a curved path from a noising process? Flow matching chooses the path — straight — and regresses a network onto its constant velocity: image minus noise. Rectified flow straightens further toward one-step sampling, and CFG, DiT, and latents all carry over unchanged.