EbbFlow: PINN-Inspired Progressive Curriculum for MeanFlow Training

Mengfan Yuan, Xunheng Kuang, Jianbin Chen, Lei He

MeanFlow learns interval-average velocity for few-step generation, but its fixed temporal sampler mixes diagonal and interior supervision throughout training. We interpret temporal coordinates as collocation points: diagonal samples provide a stochastic boundary target, whereas finite intervals supply a differential-consistency target. The diagonal fraction controls how often the consistency component appears, while interval length enters its gradient through an explicit factor. Motivated by this distinction, EbbFlow uses Temporal Supervision Allocation (TSA) to schedule the diagonal fraction and interval geometry. It starts with diagonal supervision, then admits interior samples and expands their maximum interval; a left-anchored interval law preserves coverage across time. The per-sample loss, target, backbone, and inference procedure remain unchanged. In matched class-conditional ImageNet $256\times 256$ runs without classifier-free guidance (DiT-B/2, one training seed per method, 400k updates), EbbFlow achieves 50k-sample FID of 39.65 at one network evaluation and 36.02 at two-evaluation ODE sampling, versus 44.82 and 39.86 for MeanFlow. Gradient probes show a mid-training…