Noise Schedule Optimization in Tabular Flow Matching for Convergence and Sample Quality

Abstract

Abstract: We systematically study antithetic initial noise in diffusion models, discovering that pairing each noise sample with its negation consistently produces strong negative correlation. This universal phenomenon holds across datasets, model architectures, conditional and unconditional sampling, and even other generative models such as VAEs and Normalizing Flows. To explain it, we combine experiments and theory and propose a textit\symmetry conjecture\ that the learned score function is approximately affine antisymmetric (odd symmetry up to a constant shift), supported by empirical evidence. This

Research Question

What is the impact of noise schedule design on the convergence speed and sample quality of tabular flow matching models compared to standard diffusion approaches?

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