Contrastive-Augmented Flow Matching for Style-Content Disentanglement

Yusong Li, Pingchuan Ma, Ming Gui, Vincent Tao Hu, Björn Ommer

Learning representations that separate content and style is crucial for controllable generation and compositional generalization. However, diffusion and flow-based models trained primarily with generative objectives often produce entangled or misaligned factors. To address this gap, we introduce Contrastive Augmented Flow Matching (CAtFM), a framework that integrates contrastive regularization into an invertible flow matching formulation to promote structured content-style representations. Rather than constraining intermediate latents or velocity fields, we apply contrastive supervision to predicted endpoints during training, enforcing semantic consistency across transported distributions while allowing disentanglement to emerge implicitly, without assuming strictly pure or fully factorized content and style representations. Our main experiments operate in the CLIP embedding space, with additional validation using frozen DINO and ALIGN encoders. Across synthetic data, in-domain styles, and real-world benchmarks (ImageNet, WikiArt, DomainNet, and DTD), CAtFM improves content and style retrieval, enhances embedding cluster separation, and achieves stronger open-set robustness compared to generative and discriminative baselines. Overall, CAtFM provides a simple way to couple discriminative constraints with deterministic transport, improving disentanglement and robustness under distribution shift.