PC-Flow: Preference Alignment in Flow Matching via Classifier

Abstract

Flow Matching (FM) is an efficient generative modeling framework, but aligning it with human preferences remains underexplored.~Although applying Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to diffusion models has yielded improvements, directly extending DPO-like methods to FM poses three challenges: 1) Incompatibility with ODE-based models, 2) Heavy computational cost from full model fine-tuning, and 3) Reliance on reference model quality. To address these limitations, we propose Preference Classifier for Flow Matching (PC-Flow), a novel reference-free preference alignment framework. Specifically, we reinterpret FM’s deterministic ODE as an equivalent SDE to enable DPO-style learning. Then, we introduce a lightweight classifier to model relative preferences exclusively. This approach decouples alignment from the generative model, eliminating the need for costly fine-tuning or a reference model. Theoretically, PC-Flow guarantees consistent preference-guided distribution evolution, achieves a DPO-equivalent objective without a reference model, and progressively steers generation toward preferred outputs. Experiments show that PC-Flow achieves DPO-level alignment with significantly lower training costs.