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FlowTurbo: Accelerating Flow-Based Image Generation Models via Multi-Stage Refinement

Zhao W, Shi M, Yu X, Qin Z, Zhou J, Lu J

IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, 2026

Abstract

Building on the. success of diffusion models in visual generation, flow-based models reemerge as another prominent family of generative models that have achieved competitive or better performance in terms of both visual quality and inference speed. By learning the velocity field through flow-matching, flow-based models tend to produce a straighter sampling trajectory, which is advantageous during the sampling process. However, unlike diffusion models for which fast samplers are well-developed, efficient sampling of flow-based generative models has been rarely explored. In this paper, we propose a framework called FlowTurbo to accelerate the sampling of flow-based models while still enhancing the sampling quality. Our primary observation is that the velocity predictor's outputs in the flow-based models will become stable during the sampling, enabling the estimation of velocity via a lightweight velocity refiner. Additionally, we introduce several techniques including a pseudo corrector and sample-aware compilation to further reduce inference time. Since FlowTurbo does not change the multi-step sampling paradigm, it can be effectively applied for various tasks such as image editing, inpainting, etc. Besides, we propose a new multi-stage refinement technique that is designed to reduce the inference costs with large flow-based image generation models. Specifically, the multi-stage refinement split the whole generation procedure on different resolutions, forming a coarse-to-fine…

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