MLLGDec 26, 2025

Tilt Matching for Scalable Sampling and Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2512.21829v111 citationsh-index: 22
Originality Highly original
AI Analysis

This addresses the challenge of efficient and scalable sampling and fine-tuning for generative models, offering a novel method that is incremental in improving upon existing flow matching techniques.

The paper tackles the problem of sampling from unnormalized densities and fine-tuning generative models by proposing Tilt Matching, a scalable algorithm that implicitly solves a stochastic optimal control problem, achieving state-of-the-art results on Lennard-Jones potentials and competitive performance on fine-tuning Stable Diffusion without requiring reward multipliers.

We propose a simple, scalable algorithm for using stochastic interpolants to sample from unnormalized densities and for fine-tuning generative models. The approach, Tilt Matching, arises from a dynamical equation relating the flow matching velocity to one targeting the same distribution tilted by a reward, implicitly solving a stochastic optimal control problem. The new velocity inherits the regularity of stochastic interpolant transports while also being the minimizer of an objective with strictly lower variance than flow matching itself. The update to the velocity field can be interpreted as the sum of all joint cumulants of the stochastic interpolant and copies of the reward, and to first order is their covariance. The algorithms do not require any access to gradients of the reward or backpropagating through trajectories of the flow or diffusion. We empirically verify that the approach is efficient and highly scalable, providing state-of-the-art results on sampling under Lennard-Jones potentials and is competitive on fine-tuning Stable Diffusion, without requiring reward multipliers. It can also be straightforwardly applied to tilting few-step flow map models.

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