Lune

CVPR2026Top-tier venue

Flow Map Distillation Without Data

Shangyuan Tong, Nanye Ma, Saining Xie, Tommi S. Jaakkola

2026Year
13Citations
3Top-tier citations

Abstract

State-of-the-art flow models achieve remarkable quality but require slow, iterative sampling. To accelerate this, flow maps can be distilled from pre-trained teachers, a procedure that conventionally requires sampling from an external dataset. We argue that this data-dependency introduces a fundamental risk of Teacher-Data Mismatch, as a static dataset may provide an incomplete or even misaligned representation of the teacher's full generative capabilities. This leads us to question whether this reliance on data is truly necessary for successful flow map distillation. In this work, we explore a data-free alternative that samples only from the prior distribution, a distribution the teacher is guaranteed to follow by construction, thereby circumventing the mismatch risk entirely. To demonstrate the practical viability of this philosophy, we introduce a principled framework that learns to predict the teacher's sampling path while actively correcting for its own compounding errors to ensure high fidelity. Our approach surpasses all data-based counterparts and establishes a new state-of-the-art by a significant margin. Specifically, distilling from SiT-XL/2+REPA, our method reaches an impressive FID of 1.45 on ImageNet 256x256, and 1.49 on ImageNet 512x512, both with only 1 sampling step. We hope our work establishes a more robust paradigm for accelerating generative models and motivates the broader adoption of flow map distillation without data.

Ask about this paper

Your agent reads all of it.

Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.

Questions to start from

Your agent calls

Luneget_paper_fulltext

Ask in Lune

Free to start. No credit card required.

lune papers fulltext 4391c13c-545b-404e-8b1b-1ced0f47698c

Cited by top-tier papers3

Ask how each one uses it

Builds on67

Related papers

Dusk over the sea between two cliffs drawn in fine vertical lines