Flow With What You Know

We provide an accessible introduction to flow-matching and rectified flow models, which are increasingly at the forefront of generative AI applications. Typical descriptions of them are often laden with extensive probability-math equations, which can form barriers to the dissemination and understanding of these models. Fortunately, before they were couched in probabilities, the mechanisms underlying these models were grounded in basic physics, which provides an alternative and highly accessible (yet functionally equivalent) representation of the processes involved.