# Straight-Path Flow Matching for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06281 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06281/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 23 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 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, 23 of 23)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [A Review on Generative Adversarial Networks: Algorithms, Theory, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06937/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08698/) (2023)
- [Equivariant flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15030/) (2023)
- [Deep Incomplete Multi-view Clustering with Cross-view Partial Sample and Prototype Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15689/) (2023)
- [GCFAgg: Global and Cross-view Feature Aggregation for Multi-view Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06799/) (2023)
- [Diff2Flow: Training Flow Matching Models via Diffusion Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02221/) (2025)
- [Flow Generator Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19310/) (2024)
- [Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Prototype-based Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11045/) (2023)
- [Incomplete Contrastive Multi-View Clustering with High-Confidence Guiding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08697/) (2023)
- [Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Diffusion Contrastive Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09185/) (2025)
- [Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Cross-view Relation Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00739/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Image Clustering from Multiple Incomplete Views via Constrastive Complementary Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11927/) (2022)
- [Deep Incomplete Multi-View Multiple Clusterings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02024/) (2020)

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

- [Representation Learning in Diffusion and Flow-based Model: An Application Aspect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24068/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Incomplete Multi-View Clustering addresses the problem of clustering multi-modal data when certain views are missing. Recent end-to-end generative approaches leverage diffusion models to recover missing views via stochastic noise-to-data trajectories. While expressive, such mechanisms are not explicitly designed for clustering, as they initialize from cluster-agnostic noise and rely on stochastic denoising dynamics. In this work, we revisit probability path design in end-to-end generative IMVC. We introduce a flow-matching framework with a linear interpolation path between paired view representations, that replaces diffusion with probability flows between observed and missing views. We provide a formal analysis showing that deterministic ODE flows are inherently better aligned with clustering objectives than diffusion-based stochastic trajectories, especially in terms of transport mechanisms that respect class-conditional data distributions and maintain cluster consistency in finite-step regimes. Building upon this insight, we develop an end-to-end IMVC architecture that integrates straight-path flow-matching view completion with cluster-level and entropy-based alignment to enforce cross-view clustering consistency. Extensive experiments on standard IMVC benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework establishes new state-of-the-art performance.