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Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been used recently to align diffusion models with downstream objectives such as aesthetic quality and text-image consistency by fine-tuning them to maximize a single reward function under a fixed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Min Cheng , Fatemeh Doudi , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Panganamala R. Kumar

Diffusion model alignment aims to bridge the gap between generated outputs and human preferences by enhancing both semantic consistency with textual prompts and overall visual quality. Existing alignment methods face a challenging…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Xin Xie , Jiaxian Guo , Dong Gong

Diffusion alignment aims to optimize diffusion models for the downstream objective. While existing methods based on reinforcement learning or direct backpropagation achieve considerable success in maximizing rewards, they often suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Jaewoo Lee , Minsu Kim , Sanghyeok Choi , Inhyuck Song , Sujin Yun , Hyeongyu Kang , Woocheol Shin , Taeyoung Yun , Kiyoung Om , Jinkyoo Park

Aligning diffusion model outputs with downstream objectives is essential for improving task-specific performance. Broadly, inference-time training-free approaches for aligning diffusion models can be categorized into two main strategies:…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Maurya Goyal , Anuj Singh , Hadi Jamali-Rad

The new paradigm of test-time scaling has yielded remarkable breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) (e.g. reasoning models) and in generative vision models, allowing models to allocate additional computation during inference to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Luca Eyring , Shyamgopal Karthik , Alexey Dosovitskiy , Nataniel Ruiz , Zeynep Akata

Diffusion models generate highly realistic images but often struggle with precise text-image alignment. While recent post-training methods improve alignment using external rewards or human preference signals, their performance heavily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jaa-Yeon Lee , Yeobin Hong , Taesung Kwon , Jong Chul Ye

We introduce a principled probabilistic framework for reward-guided decoding in large language models, addressing the limitations of standard decoding methods that optimize token-level likelihood rather than sequence-level quality. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jelena Markovic-Voronov , Wenhui Zhu , Bo Long , Zhipeng Wang , Suyash Gupta , Kayhan Behdin , Bee-Chung Chen , Deepak Agarwal

We develop diffusion-based samplers for target distributions known up to a normalising constant. To this end, we rely on the well-known diffusion path that smoothly interpolates between a simple base distribution and the target, popularised…

Diffusion models are state-of-the-art generative models, yet their samples often fail to satisfy application objectives such as safety constraints or domain-specific validity. Existing techniques for alignment require gradients, internal…

Discrete diffusion models are a class of generative models that produce samples from an approximated data distribution within a discrete state space. Often, there is a need to target specific regions of the data distribution. Current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Cheuk Kit Lee , Paul Jeha , Jes Frellsen , Pietro Lio , Michael Samuel Albergo , Francisco Vargas

Test-time alignment (TTA) aims to adapt models to specific rewards during inference. However, existing methods tend to either under-optimise or over-optimise (reward hack) the target reward function. We propose Null-Text Test-Time Alignment…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Taehoon Kim , Henry Gouk , Timothy Hospedales

This tutorial provides a comprehensive survey of methods for fine-tuning diffusion models to optimize downstream reward functions. While diffusion models are widely known to provide excellent generative modeling capability, practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Masatoshi Uehara , Yulai Zhao , Tommaso Biancalani , Sergey Levine

We address the challenge of training diffusion models to sample from unnormalized energy distributions in the absence of data, the so-called diffusion samplers. Although these approaches have shown promise, they struggle to scale in more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Minkyu Kim , Kiyoung Seong , Dongyeop Woo , Sungsoo Ahn , Minsu Kim

Diffusion models excel at capturing complex data distributions, such as those of natural images and proteins. While diffusion models are trained to represent the distribution in the training dataset, we often are more concerned with other…

Bridging the gap between diffusion models and human preferences is crucial for their integration into practical generative workflows. While optimizing downstream reward models has emerged as a promising alignment strategy, concerns arise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Ziyi Zhang , Sen Zhang , Yibing Zhan , Yong Luo , Yonggang Wen , Dacheng Tao

Aligning text-to-image diffusion model (T2I) with preference has been gaining increasing research attention. While prior works exist on directly optimizing T2I by preference data, these methods are developed under the bandit assumption of a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Shentao Yang , Tianqi Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

Learning from feedback has been shown to enhance the alignment between text prompts and images in text-to-image diffusion models. However, due to the lack of focus in feedback content, especially regarding the object type and quantity,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Xuexiang Niu , Jinping Tang , Lei Wang , Ge Zhu

Video diffusion alignment has been heavily relied on scalar rewards. These rewards are typically derived from learned reward models in human preference datasets, requiring additional training and extensive collection. Moreover, scalar…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Yifan Wang , Yanyu Li , Gordon Guocheng Qian , Sergey Tulyakov , Yun Fu , Anil Kag

To sample from a general target distribution $p_*\propto e^{-f_*}$ beyond the isoperimetric condition, Huang et al. (2023) proposed to perform sampling through reverse diffusion, giving rise to Diffusion-based Monte Carlo (DMC).…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-15 Xunpeng Huang , Difan Zou , Hanze Dong , Yian Ma , Tong Zhang

Aligning diffusion models to downstream tasks often requires finetuning new models or gradient-based guidance at inference time to enable sampling from the reward-tilted posterior. In this work, we explore a simple inference-time…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Anuj Singh , Sayak Mukherjee , Ahmad Beirami , Hadi Jamali-Rad