Mirror Flow Matching with Heavy-Tailed Priors for Generative Modeling on Convex Domains

Abstract

We study generative modeling on convex domains using flow matching and mirror maps, and identify two fundamental challenges. First, standard log-barrier mirror maps induce heavy-tailed dual distributions, leading to ill-posed dynamics. Second, coupling with Gaussian priors performs poorly when matching heavy-tailed targets. To address these issues, we propose Mirror Flow Matching based on a \emph{regularized mirror map} that controls dual tail behavior and guarantees finite moments, together with coupling to a Student-$t$ prior that aligns with heavy-tailed targets and stabilizes training. We provide theoretical guarantees, including spatial Lipschitzness and temporal regularity of the velocity field, Wasserstein convergence rates for flow matching with Student-$t$ priors and primal-space guarantees for constrained generation, under $\varepsilon$-accurate learned velocity fields. Empirically, our method outperforms baselines in synthetic convex-domain simulations and achieves competitive sample quality on real-world constrained generative tasks.

Cite

Text

Guan et al. "Mirror Flow Matching with Heavy-Tailed Priors for Generative Modeling on Convex Domains." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.

Markdown

[Guan et al. "Mirror Flow Matching with Heavy-Tailed Priors for Generative Modeling on Convex Domains." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.](https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2026/guan2026iclr-mirror/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{guan2026iclr-mirror,
  title     = {{Mirror Flow Matching with Heavy-Tailed Priors for Generative Modeling on Convex Domains}},
  author    = {Guan, Yunrui and Balasubramanian, Krishna and Ma, Shiqian},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2026/guan2026iclr-mirror/}
}