English

Fine-Tuning Discrete Diffusion Models with Policy Gradient Methods

Machine Learning 2025-12-19 v3 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

Discrete diffusion models have recently gained significant attention due to their ability to process complex discrete structures for language modeling. However, fine-tuning these models with policy gradient methods, as is commonly done in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), remains a challenging task. We propose an efficient, broadly applicable, and theoretically justified policy gradient algorithm, called Score Entropy Policy Optimization (\SEPO), for fine-tuning discrete diffusion models over non-differentiable rewards. Our numerical experiments across several discrete generative tasks demonstrate the scalability and efficiency of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/ozekri/SEPO.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.01384,
  title  = {Fine-Tuning Discrete Diffusion Models with Policy Gradient Methods},
  author = {Oussama Zekri and Nicolas Boullé},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.01384},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

33 pages, 8 figures, 8 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:30:38.976Z