Dynamic Conditional Optimal Transport through Simulation-Free Flows

We study the geometry of conditional optimal transport (COT) and prove a dynamical formulation which generalizes the Benamou-Brenier Theorem. With these tools, we propose a simulation-free flow-based method for conditional generative modeling. Our method couples an arbitrary source distribution to a specified target distribution through a triangular COT plan. We build on the framework of flow matching to train a conditional generative model by approximating the geodesic path of measures induced by this COT plan. Our theory and methods are applicable in the infinite-dimensional setting, making them well suited for inverse problems. Empirically, we demonstrate our proposed method on two image-to-image translation tasks and an infinite-dimensional Bayesian inverse problem.

Functional Flow Matching

In this work, we propose Functional Flow Matching (FFM), a function-space generative model that generalizes the recently-introduced Flow Matching model to operate directly in infinite-dimensional spaces. Our approach works by first defining a path of probability measures that interpolates between a fixed Gaussian measure and the data distribution, followed by learning a vector field on the underlying space of functions that generates this path of measures. Our method does not rely on likelihoods or simulations, making it well-suited to the function space setting. We provide both a theoretical framework for building such models and an empirical evaluation of our techniques. We demonstrate through experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks that our proposed FFM method outperforms several recently proposed function-space generative models.