Flow Matching on Symmetric Spaces

arXiv cs.LG / 5/6/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper proposes a general training framework for flow matching models on Riemannian symmetric spaces, covering manifolds such as spheres, hyperbolic space, and Grassmannians.
  • It leverages the algebraic structure of symmetric spaces to reformulate flow matching as a problem on a subspace of the Lie algebra of the isometry group.
  • This reformulation effectively linearizes the learning problem and makes geodesic handling substantially easier.
  • As a demonstration, the authors apply the framework to real Grassmannians of the form SO(n) / (SO(k) × SO(n−k)).

Abstract

We introduce a general framework for training flow matching models on Riemannian symmetric spaces, a large class of manifolds that includes the sphere, hyperbolic space and Grassmannians. We exploit their algebraic structure to reformulate flow matching on symmetric spaces as flow matching on a subspace of the Lie algebra of their isometry group, thus linearizing the problem and greatly simplifying the handling of geodesics. As an application, we showcase our framework on the real Grassmannians \operatorname{SO}(n) / \operatorname{SO}(k) \times \operatorname{SO}(n-k).