Purrception: Variational Flow Matching for Vector-Quantized Image Generation

We introduce Purrception, a variational flow matching approach for vectorquantized image generation that provides explicit categorical supervision while maintaining continuous transport dynamics. Our method adapts Variational Flow Matching to vector-quantized latents by learning categorical posteriors over codebook indices while computing velocity fields in the continuous embedding space. This combines the geometric awareness of continuous methods with the discrete supervision of categorical approaches, enabling uncertainty quantification over plausible codes and temperature-controlled generation. We evaluate Purrception on ImageNet-1k 256 × 256 generation. Training converges faster than both continuous flow matching and discrete flow matching baselines while achieving competitive FID scores with state-of-the-art models. This demonstrates that Variational Flow Matching can effectively bridge continuous transport and discrete supervision for improved training efficiency in image generation. † Research done during an internship at UvA-Bosch Delta Lab and a visit at LMU Munich. * Equal contribution as last authors.