Duality Models: An Embarrassingly Simple One-step Generation Paradigm

Consistency-based generative models like Shortcut and MeanFlow achieve impressive results via a target-aware design for solving the Probability Flow ODE (PF-ODE). Typically, such methods introduce a target time $r$ alongside the current time $t$ to modulate outputs between a local multi-step derivative ($r = t$) and a global few-step integral ($r = 0$). However, the conventional "one input, one output" paradigm enforces a partition of the training budget, often allocating a significant portion (e.g., 75% in MeanFlow) solely to the multi-step objective for stability. This separation forces a trade-off: allocating sufficient samples to the multi-step objective leaves the few-step generation undertrained, which harms convergence and limits scalability.To this end, we propose Duality Models (DuMo) via a "one input, dual output" paradigm. Using a shared backbone with dual heads, DuMo simultaneously predicts velocity $\mathbf{v}_t$ and flow-map $\mathbf{u}_t$ from a single input $\mathbf{x}_t$. This applies geometric constraints from the multi-step objective to every sample, bounding the few-step estimation without separating training objectives, thereby significantly improving stability and efficiency. On ImageNet $256 \times 256$, a 679M Diffusion Transformer with SD-VAE achieves a state-of-the-art (SOTA) FID of 1.79 in just 2 steps.Code will be publicly available.