@inproceedings{
gat2024discrete,
title={Discrete Flow Matching},
author={Itai Gat and Tal Remez and Neta Shaul and Felix Kreuk and Ricky T. Q. Chen and Gabriel Synnaeve and Yossi Adi and Yaron Lipman},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=GTDKo3Sv9p}
}
Despite Flow Matching and diffusion models having emerged as powerful generative paradigms for continuous variables such as images and videos, their application to high-dimensional discrete data, such as language, is still limited.  In this work, we present Discrete Flow Matching, a novel discrete flow paradigm designed specifically for generating discrete data.  Discrete Flow Matching offers several key contributions:  (i) it works with a general family of probability paths interpolating between source and target distributions; (ii) it allows for a generic formula for sampling from these probability paths using learned posteriors such as the probability denoiser ($x$-prediction) and noise-prediction ($\epsilon$-prediction); (iii) practically, focusing on specific probability paths defined with different schedulers improves generative perplexity compared to previous discrete diffusion and flow models; and (iv) by scaling Discrete Flow Matching models up to 1.7B parameters, we reach 6.7% Pass@1 and 13.4% Pass@10 on HumanEval and 6.7% Pass@1 and 20.6% Pass@10 on 1-shot MBPP coding benchmarks. Our approach is capable of generating high-quality discrete data in a non-autoregressive fashion, significantly closing the gap between autoregressive models and discrete flow models.
Discrete Flow Matching
Itai Gat Tal Remez Neta Shaul Felix Kreuk Ricky T. Q. Chen Gabriel Synnaeve Yossi Adi Yaron Lipman