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Nicholas Boffi

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@nmboffi

assistant professor @mldcmu & cmu mathematics. creating the future of generative modeling with flow maps

previously @Harvard, @MIT, @GoogleAI, @NYU_Courant.
Pittsburgh, PA nmboffi.github.io Joined July 2023
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Nicholas Boffi Verified account @nmboffi
🤯 big update to our flow map language models paper!

we believe this is the future of non-autoregressive text generation.

read about it in the blog: one-step-lm.github.io/blog/

full details in the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2602.16813

we introduce a new class of continuous flow-based language models and distill them into their corresponding flow map for one-step text generation.

we beat all discrete diffusion baselines at ~8x speed!

v2 gives a complete theory of the flow map over discrete data, with three equivalent ways to learn it (semigroup, lagrangian, eulerian). it turns out you can train these with cross-entropy objectives that look very similar to standard discrete diffusion — but without the factorization error that kills discrete methods at few steps.

beyond improving results across the board, we showcase properties that are unique to continuous flows. in particular, inference-time steering and guidance become straightforward. autoguidance brings generative perplexity down to 51.6 on LM1B, while discrete baselines completely collapse at the same guidance scale.

we also show reward-guided generation for steering topic, sentiment, grammaticality, and safety at inference time — and it works even at 1-2 steps with our flow map model. simple, well-understood techniques from continuous flows just work incredibly well in practice for language.

we’re extremely excited about the future of this class of models.

stay tuned for results on scaling, reasoning, and reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning. 🚀
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Nicholas Boffi Verified account @nmboffi
more flow maps with exact likelihoods! was a ton of fun to work on this :)
Joey Bose Verified account @bose_joey Oct 19
🚨 New Paper Alert, 🎤 Accepted for an oral presentation at the NeurIPS 2026 STODY workshop!

📣 Introducing: Normalizing Flow Maps (NFM): Combining few-step transport from Flow maps with tractable likelihoods from Normalizing Flows.

This is my first work with my first crop of new PhD students, @francescoshox and @tim_hitge, who genuinely knocked this project out of the park.

📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2610.22711
📝 Blog: the-bose-lab.github.io/normalizing-fl…
💻 Code: github.com/francescoshox/…

🧵
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Nicholas Boffi Verified account @nmboffi
times change, and as a community we need to adapt.

the scientific process looks very different now than it did six months ago, and that will likely continue.

this is an exciting time in human history and we should be embracing the new tools to accelerate scientific progress
Aran Nayebi Verified account @aran_nayebi Oct 17
I don't get this reaction at all.

If you're truly curious about the world (rather than egotistical credit-seeking), the proper reaction to AI (likely) solving nearly 400 long-standing open problems would be curiosity & interest to better understand the frontier, not disavow it.
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