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arXiv · 2610.16654

Guidance Without Labels: Flow Matching from Coupled Gaussian Mixtures

Stanislas Ducotterd·Bassam El Rawas·Michael Unser
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Abstract

Flow matching models are typically trained to transport a Gaussian source to the data distribution, with source and target samples paired independently. We replace the source with a fitted Gaussian mixture and couple each data point to a mixture component through an entropic optimal transport problem. We show that the resulting transport reduces to the standard Gaussian-source problem up to a guidance-like correction, which enables the reuse of a pretrained velocity field. This correction is a closed-form function of the fitted mixture plus a term that we learn with a small correction network. We test our model on published checkpoints for CIFAR-10 and CelebA-HQ. It improves FID at every step count, and on CelebA-HQ it reaches the quality of the baseline with about half the steps. The closed-form term alone, with no training, already delivers most of this improvement; the small correction network accounts for the rest.

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Stanislas Ducotterd, Bassam El Rawas, Michael Unser. 2026-10-12. Guidance Without Labels: Flow Matching from Coupled Gaussian Mixtures. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16654

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