AegisFlow: Training-Free Non-Myopic Path-Safe Guided Flow Matching

Abstract

Pretrained generative models, such as diffusion and flow matching models, have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in synthesizing high-quality data. However, steering their generative trajectories to satisfy strict constraints--such as identity preservation in image editing or obstacle avoidance in robotics--remains fundamentally challenging. While recent training-free guidance methods enforce path-safety, they rely heavily on min-norm controllers that only account for immediate constraint satisfaction. These myopic approaches often yield suboptimal trajectories that hover dangerously close to the boundary, severely restricting the model's ability to optimize toward its target. In this paper, we propose AegisFlow, a training-free, non-myopic path-safe guidance framework that recasts guided generation as a safety-critical optimal control problem with global scope. By integrating a time-varying barrier function directly into the global cost functional, AegisFlow naturally enforces constraints along the entire generative path. To compute the global optimal control, we derive a tractable, mathematically grounded approximation of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that AegisFlow outperforms state-of-the-art methods across text-guided image manipulation and robotic planning, establishing a significantly better trade-off between target alignment and constraint satisfaction. Code is available at https://github.com/LiuKunpeng03/AegisFlow.