Universal Inverse Distillation for Matching Models with Real-Data Supervision (No GANs)

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission19629 Authors

Keywords: Diffusion models, Flow Matching, Acceleration of diffusion/flow models, Distillation of diffusion/flow models

Abstract: While achieving exceptional generative quality, modern diffusion, flow, and other matching models suffer from slow inference, as they require many steps of iterative generation. Recent distillation methods address this by training efficient one-step generators under the guidance of a pre-trained teacher model. However, these methods are often constrained to only one specific framework, e.g., only to diffusion or only to flow models. Furthermore, these methods are naturally data-free, and to benefit from the usage of real data, it is required to use an additional complex adversarial training with an extra discriminator model. In this paper, we present \textbf{RealUID}, a unified distillation framework for all matching models that seamlessly incorporates real data into the distillation procedure without GANs. Our \textbf{RealUID} approach offers a simple theoretical foundation that covers previous distillation methods for Flow Matching and Diffusion models, and is also extended to their modifications, such as Bridge Matching and Stochastic Interpolants.

Primary Area: generative models

Submission Number: 19629