# Perceptual Flow Matching for Few-Step Generative Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03524 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03524/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Flow matching, time series and science, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 34 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Flow matching, time series and science](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/flow-matching-time-series-and-science/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13447/) (2025)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)
- [InternVideo2: Scaling Foundation Models for Multimodal Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15377/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11690/) (2025)
- [Simplifying, Stabilizing and Scaling Continuous-Time Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11081/) (2024)
- [REPA-E: Unlocking VAE for End-to-End Tuning with Latent Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10483/) (2025)
- [HPSv3: Towards Wide-Spectrum Human Preference Score](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03789/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Matrix-Game 3.5: Enhancing Real-Time Streaming Interactive World Models with Patch Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29910/) (2026)
- [Three-Body Scattering for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18198/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Autoregressive Video Generation via Representation Adversarial Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40037/) (2026)
- [ForcingBooster: Adaptive Patch-wise Denoising for Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12625/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose Perceptual Flow Matching (PFM), a simple yet effective framework for few-step generation in flow-matching models. Rather than performing velocity regression in the conventional VAE latent space, PFM supervises flow matching in a perceptual feature space using pretrained perceptual models. This simple change substantially improves the few-step generation capability of flow-matching models, reducing the number of sampling steps from 35-50 to 4-8 while preserving generation quality. Unlike existing acceleration and distillation approaches, PFM requires neither teacher models nor auxiliary score networks and can be integrated into standard flow-matching training pipelines with minimal modifications. Extensive experiments on image generation, video generation, and image editing tasks demonstrate that PFM consistently produces high-quality results while producing fewer artifacts than existing distillation-based methods. We further show that perceptual supervision shifts the regression minimizer from mean-seeking to mode-seeking, biasing predictions toward on-manifold modes that remain accurate under coarse few-step integration. Our results reveal that standard flow-matching training can naturally yield high-quality few-step generators when supervised in an appropriate representation space. We hope this insight inspires future research into representation-aware objectives for efficient generative modeling.