# FlowBind: Efficient Any-to-Any Generation with Bidirectional Flows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15420 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15420/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05519/) (2023)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [PointFlow: 3D Point Cloud Generation with Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12320/) (2019)
- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [Unified-IO 2: Scaling Autoregressive Multimodal Models with Vision, Language, Audio, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17172/) (2023)
- [Pix3D: Dataset and Methods for Single-Image 3D Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04610/) (2018)
- [AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12226/) (2024)
- [Wav2CLIP: Learning Robust Audio Representations From CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11499/) (2021)
- [Any-to-Any Generation via Composable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11846/) (2023)
- [Optimus: Organizing Sentences via Pre-trained Modeling of a Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04092/) (2020)
- [Seeing and Hearing: Open-domain Visual-Audio Generation with Diffusion Latent Aligners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17723/) (2024)
- [Make-An-Audio 2: Temporal-Enhanced Text-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18474/) (2023)
- [TangoFlux: Super Fast and Faithful Text to Audio Generation with Flow Matching and Clap-Ranked Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21037/) (2024)
- [Muddit: Liberating Generation Beyond Text-to-Image with a Unified Discrete Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23606/) (2025)
- [Unified Multimodal Discrete Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20853/) (2025)
- [OmniFlow: Any-to-Any Generation with Multi-Modal Rectified Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01169/) (2024)
- [Orthus: Autoregressive Interleaved Image-Text Generation with Modality-Specific Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00127/) (2024)
- [FlowTok: Flowing Seamlessly Across Text and Image Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10772/) (2025)
- [Flowing from Words to Pixels: A Noise-Free Framework for Cross-Modality Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15213/) (2024)
- [MIO: A Foundation Model on Multimodal Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17692/) (2024)
- [Diffuse Everything: Multimodal Diffusion Models on Arbitrary State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07903/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MUNI: Multimodal Unified Latent Diffusion for Coherent Any-to-Any Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16408/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Any-to-any generation seeks to translate between arbitrary subsets of modalities, enabling flexible cross-modal synthesis. Despite recent success, existing flow-based approaches are challenged by their inefficiency, as they require large-scale datasets often with restrictive pairing constraints, incur high computational cost from modeling joint distribution, and rely on complex multi-stage training. We propose FlowBind, an efficient framework for any-to-any generation. Our approach is distinguished by its simplicity: it learns a shared latent space capturing cross-modal information, with modality-specific invertible flows bridging this latent to each modality. Both components are optimized jointly under a single flow-matching objective, and at inference the invertible flows act as encoders and decoders for direct translation across modalities. By factorizing interactions through the shared latent, FlowBind naturally leverages arbitrary subsets of modalities for training, and achieves competitive generation quality while substantially reducing data requirements and computational cost. Experiments on text, image, and audio demonstrate that FlowBind attains comparable quality while requiring up to 6x fewer parameters and training 10x faster than prior methods. The project page with code is available at https://yeonwoo378.github.io/official_flowbind.