Trajectory as the Teacher: Few-Step Discrete Flow Matching via Energy-Navigated Distillation

ArXi:2605.07924v1 Announce Type: cross Discrete flow matching generates text by iteratively transforming noise tokens into coherent language, but may require hundreds of forward passes. Distillation uses the multi-step trajectory to train a student to reproduce the process in a few steps. When the student underperforms, the usual explanation is insufficient capacity. We argue the opposite: the trajectory is the bottleneck, not the student. Each