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Generalization and Memorization in Rectified Flow

arXiv cs.LG / 3/17/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper studies memorization dynamics of Rectified Flow (RF) generative models using Membership Inference Attacks (MIA).
  • It develops three MIA test statistics and a complexity-calibrated metric (T_mc_cal) that decouples intrinsic image complexity from memorization signals, boosting attack AUC by up to 15% and TPR@1%FPR by up to 45%.
  • It identifies that MIA susceptibility under standard uniform temporal training peaks at the integration midpoint due to the model's deviation from linear behavior.
  • It proposes Symmetric Exponential (U-shaped) timestep sampling to minimize exposure to vulnerable intermediate timesteps, validated across three datasets with memorization suppression while preserving generative fidelity.

Abstract

Generative models based on the Flow Matching objective, particularly Rectified Flow, have emerged as a dominant paradigm for efficient, high-fidelity image synthesis. However, while existing research heavily prioritizes generation quality and architectural scaling, the underlying dynamics of how RF models memorize training data remain largely underexplored. In this paper, we systematically investigate the memorization behaviors of RF through the test statistics of Membership Inference Attacks (MIA). We progressively formulate three test statistics, culminating in a complexity-calibrated metric (T_\text{mc\_cal}) that successfully decouples intrinsic image spatial complexity from genuine memorization signals. This calibration yields a significant performance surge -- boosting attack AUC by up to 15\% and the privacy-critical TPR@1\%FPR metric by up to 45\% -- establishing the first non-trivial MIA specifically tailored for RF. Leveraging these refined metrics, we uncover a distinct temporal pattern: under standard uniform temporal training, a model's susceptibility to MIA strictly peaks at the integration midpoint, a phenomenon we justify via the network's forced deviation from linear approximations. Finally, we demonstrate that substituting uniform timestep sampling with a Symmetric Exponential (U-shaped) distribution effectively minimizes exposure to vulnerable intermediate timesteps. Extensive evaluations across three datasets confirm that this temporal regularization suppresses memorization while preserving generative fidelity.