Constraint-Aware Flow Matching: Decision Aligned End-to-End Training for Constrained Sampling
For practitioners needing physically plausible generative samples, this method solves the performance degradation caused by training-free constrained sampling.
Constraint-Aware Flow Matching addresses the training-sampling misalignment in constrained generative models by integrating constraint projections into the training objective, achieving strict constraint satisfaction with high sample quality across three real-world benchmarks.
Deep generative models provide state-of-the-art performance across a wide array of applications, with recent studies showing increasing applicability for science and engineering. Despite a growing corpus of literature focused on the integration of physics-based constraints into the generation process, existing approaches fail to enforce strict constraint satisfaction while maintaining sample quality. In particular, training-free constrained sampling methods, while providing per-sample feasibility guarantees, introduce a fundamental mismatch between the training objective and the constrained sampling procedure, often leading to performance degradation. Identifying this training-sampling misalignment as a central limitation of current constrained generative modeling approaches, this paper proposes Constraint-Aware Flow Matching, a novel end-to-end framework that explicitly incorporates constraint projections into the training objective. By aligning the model's learned dynamics with the constrained sampling process, the proposed method mitigates distributional shift induced by projection-based corrections, enabling high-quality constrained generation. The proposed approach is evaluated on three challenging real-world benchmarks, illustrating the generality and efficacy of the method.