
Follow the Mean: Reference-Guided Flow Matching
Flow matching, a generative framework gaining traction as an alternative to diffusion, now admits a novel control mechanism: steering pretrained models by shifting the reference distribution they interpolate toward. Researchers demonstrate that for deterministic flows, the velocity field depends solely on the conditional endpoint mean, enabling training-free guidance through example banks. Applied to FLUX.2-klein, this approach unlocks fine-grained control over color, identity, style, and structure without retraining or auxiliary networks. The finding matters because it expands the toolkit for controllable generation beyond fine-tuning and test-time search, potentially lowering the barrier for practitioners to customize foundation models on-the-fly.62



















