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arXiv · 2610.18552

Unbalanced W-Flow: Unbalanced Wasserstein Drifting under Finite-Batch Marginal Fluctuations

Jongwook Jeon·Mingue Park·Jiwon Choi·Jaihoon Kim·Yunhong Min·Minhyuk Sung
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Abstract

Teacher-free one-step generative models such as W-Flow learn directly from distributional objectives, with the Sinkhorn divergence providing the strongest empirical performance among the energies studied in W-Flow. However, Sinkhorn divergence is based on balanced optimal transport, whose exact marginal constraints can induce undesirable transport under finite minibatch fluctuations. We introduce UW-Flow, which replaces the balanced Sinkhorn energy with a debiased unbalanced Sinkhorn divergence and derives the corresponding Wasserstein velocity. The resulting dynamics retain W-Flow's cross-minus-self structure, recover the balanced limit, and preserve target identifiability under suitable assumptions. We further characterize the finite-batch velocity error of balanced and unbalanced transport by comparing each minibatch field with its population counterpart. Our analysis identifies conditions under which marginal relaxation yields smaller minibatch-to-population velocity error, and shows that for separated matched modes, balanced sensitivity grows with inter-mode separation while the corresponding Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) sensitivity remains controlled by local transport geometry. Controlled experiments on fixed-support and continuous two-mode distributions support these predictions. On MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet-100, UW-Flow improves generation under matched training budgets, with the largest gains in unconditional generation and consistent improvements in the class-conditional setting.

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Jongwook Jeon, Mingue Park, Jiwon Choi, Jaihoon Kim, Yunhong Min, Minhyuk Sung. 2026-10-13. Unbalanced W-Flow: Unbalanced Wasserstein Drifting under Finite-Batch Marginal Fluctuations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18552

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