Restricting noise prediction to a low-rank subspace reached 1.57 FID on ImageNet 256 and gave a first route from latent flow models to pixel-space ones
AspireAI community · arXiv (NeurIPS 2026)
Asymmetric Flow Modeling constrains only the noise-prediction half of the velocity to a low-rank subspace while keeping data prediction full-dimensional, and analytically recovers the full velocity without changing the network architecture or the standard flow-matching recipe. The authors report a leading 1.57 FID on ImageNet 256x256, and use the same mechanism to finetune FLUX.2 klein 9B from latent space into a pixel-space model, reporting new state-of-the-art results on HPSv3, DPG-Bench and GenEval. The claims come from the authors' own evaluations, and the paper reports no independent replication.
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.