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Trajectory as the Teacher: Few-Step Discrete Flow Matching via Energy-Navigated Distillation
Apple researchers propose Trajectory‑Shaped Discrete Flow Matching (TS‑DFM), a training‑time distillation method that replaces blind stochastic jumps in discrete flow‑matching with an energy‑based compass to select higher‑quality intermediate tokens. On a 170 M‑parameter language model, the 8‑step student outperforms the 1 024‑step teacher by 32 % perplexity while being 128× faster, beating basel…
Apple Machine Learning Researchapple.com1 minpaper