High-Order Flow Matching: Unified Framework and Sharp Statistical Rates

Maojiang Su, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Yi-Chen Lee, Ning Zhu, Jui-Hui Chung, Shang Wu, Zhao Song, Minshuo Chen, Han Liu

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Flow matching is an emerging generative modeling framework that learns continuous-time dynamics to map noise into data. To enhance expressiveness and sampling efficiency, recent works have explored incorporating high-order trajectory information. Despite the empirical success, a holistic theoretical foundation is still lacking. We present a unified framework for standard and high-order flow matching that incorporates trajectory derivatives up to an arbitrary order $K$. Our key innovation is establishing the marginalization technique that converts the intractable $K$-order loss into a simple conditional regression with exact gradients and identifying the consistency constraint. We establish sharp statistical rates of the $K$-order flow matching implemented with transformer networks. With $n$ samples, flow matching estimates nonparametric distributions at a rate $\tilde{O}(n^{-\Theta(1/d )})$, matching minimax lower bounds up to logarithmic factors.