# Contextual Flow Matching: Adaptive Step Selection in Flow Models for Efficient Visual Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03202/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 39 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [InstaFlow: One Step is Enough for High-Quality Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06380/) (2023)
- [Pyramidal Flow Matching for Efficient Video Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05954/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Distillation in Iterative Generative Models for Improved Sampling Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02388/) (2021)
- [Timestep Embedding Tells: It's Time to Cache for Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19108/) (2024)
- [Deep Generative Modelling: A Comparative Review of VAEs, GANs, Normalizing Flows, Energy-Based and Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04922/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10647/) (2023)
- [Taming Rectified Flow for Inversion and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04746/) (2024)
- [Flow Matching in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08698/) (2023)
- [Consistency Flow Matching: Defining Straight Flows with Velocity Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02398/) (2024)
- [PeRFlow: Piecewise Rectified Flow as Universal Plug-and-Play Accelerator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07510/) (2024)
- [Optimal Flow Matching: Learning Straight Trajectories in Just One Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13117/) (2024)
- [FireFlow: Fast Inversion of Rectified Flow for Image Semantic Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07517/) (2024)
- [Conditional Text Image Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10804/) (2023)
- [Bespoke Solvers for Generative Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19075/) (2023)
- [FlowTok: Flowing Seamlessly Across Text and Image Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10772/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Flow Matching enables high-quality visual generation via continuous-time dynamics, but inference remains costly due to multiple sequential function evaluations. Existing acceleration methods reduce the number of function evaluations but often introduce additional training overhead, degrade quality, or fail to account for input-dependent variability. We propose COFLOW, an inference-time method that adaptively selects the step counts each generation based on the prompt features. Our context-aware COFLOW is trained online with an unsupervised reward that balances inference efficiency and generation fidelity. Our method is plug-and-play, requiring no retraining of the underlying generative model. It generalizes to image and video generation, achieving over 2.5x speedup while preserving perceptual and semantic quality. We further provide a theoretical analysis establishing an O(1/K) forward-Euler discretization error bound under standard regularity conditions.