mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Flow Map Distillation Without Data

arXiv 2511.19428 ↗First posted 24 Nov 2025cs.LG cs.CVcited by 14

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Abstract (arXiv)

State-of-the-art flow models achieve remarkable quality but require slow, iterative sampling. To accelerate this, flow maps can be distilled from pre-trained teachers, a procedure that conventionally requires sampling from an external dataset. We argue that this data-dependency introduces a fundamental risk of Teacher-Data Mismatch, as a static dataset may provide an incomplete or even misaligned representation of the teacher's full generative capabilities. This leads us to question whether this reliance on data is truly necessary for successful flow map distillation. In this work, we explore a data-free alternative that samples only from the prior distribution, a distribution the teacher is guaranteed to follow by construction, thereby circumventing the mismatch risk entirely. To demonstrate the practical viability of this philosophy, we introduce a principled framework that learns to predict the teacher's sampling path while actively correcting for its own compounding errors to ensure high fidelity. Our approach surpasses all data-based counterparts and establishes a new state-of-the-art by a significant margin. Specifically, distilling from SiT-XL/2+REPA, our method reaches an impressive FID of 1.45 on ImageNet 256x256, and 1.49 on ImageNet 512x512, both with only 1 sampling step. We hope our work establishes a more robust paradigm for accelerating generative models and motivates the broader adoption of flow map distillation without data.

Key facts. Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 93 of its 107 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

Builds on

93 of 107 references.

References · 93

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38 more
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50 most cited of 93 All 93 (JSON)

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Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 13.

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  1. 2026Path-Guided Flow Matching for Dataset Distillation
  2. 2026FlowMap-OPD: Rollout--Kernel Separation for On-Policy Distillation of Few-Step Flow-Map Generators
  3. 2026Geometry-Aware Time Reparameterization for Flow-Map Distillation
  4. 2023Sampling to Distill: Knowledge Transfer from Open-World Data
  5. 2026Logit Distillation on Manifolds: Mapping by Learning
  6. 2026Curriculum Sampling: A Two-Phase Curriculum for Efficient Training of Flow Matching
  7. 2026Categorical Flow Maps
  8. 2026Distribution Matching Distillation without Fake Score Network