English
Related papers

Related papers: Test-time Alignment of Diffusion Models without Re…

200 papers

Discrete diffusion models have recently emerged as strong alternatives to autoregressive language models, matching their performance through large-scale training. However, inference-time control remains relatively underexplored. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Meihua Dang , Jiaqi Han , Minkai Xu , Kai Xu , Akash Srivastava , Stefano Ermon

Inference-time controllable generation is essential for real-world applications of unconditional diffusion models. However, most existing techniques focus on individual samples, struggling in applications that require the sample population…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hao Luan , See-Kiong Ng , Chun Kai Ling

While score-based generative models are the model of choice across diverse domains, there are limited tools available for controlling inference-time behavior in a principled manner, e.g. for composing multiple pretrained models. Existing…

Diffusion models have become prevalent in generative modeling due to their ability to sample from complex distributions. To improve the quality of generated samples and their compliance with user requirements, two commonly used methods are:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Shervin Khalafi , Ignacio Hounie , Dongsheng Ding , Alejandro Ribeiro

Recent research has shown that fine-tuning diffusion models (DMs) with arbitrary rewards, including non-differentiable ones, is feasible with reinforcement learning (RL) techniques, enabling flexible model alignment. However, applying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Zhiwei Jia , Yuesong Nan , Huixi Zhao , Gengdai Liu

Although diffusion models have achieved strong results in decision-making tasks, their slow inference speed remains a key limitation. While consistency models offer a potential solution, existing applications to decision-making either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Xintong Duan , Yutong He , Fahim Tajwar , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , J. Zico Kolter , Jeff Schneider

Test-time adaptation harnesses test inputs to improve the accuracy of a model trained on source data when tested on shifted target data. Existing methods update the source model by (re-)training on each target domain. While effective,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Jin Gao , Jialing Zhang , Xihui Liu , Trevor Darrell , Evan Shelhamer , Dequan Wang

The performance of text-to-image diffusion models may be improved at test-time by scaling computation to search for a generated image that maximizes a given reward function. While existing trajectory level exploration methods improve the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Qingtao Yu , Changlin Song , Minghao Sun , Zhengyang Yu , Vinay Kumar Verma , Soumya Roy , Sumit Negi , Hongdong Li , Dylan Campbell

Diffusion models have been successful on a range of conditional generation tasks including molecular design and text-to-image generation. However, these achievements have primarily depended on task-specific conditional training or…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-26 Luhuan Wu , Brian L. Trippe , Christian A. Naesseth , David M. Blei , John P. Cunningham

To fully leverage the capabilities of diffusion models, we are often interested in optimizing downstream reward functions during inference. While numerous algorithms for reward-guided generation have been recently proposed due to their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Masatoshi Uehara , Xingyu Su , Yulai Zhao , Xiner Li , Aviv Regev , Shuiwang Ji , Sergey Levine , Tommaso Biancalani

Diffusion models excel at generating images conditioned on text prompts, but the resulting images often do not satisfy user-specific criteria measured by scalar rewards such as Aesthetic Scores. This alignment typically requires…

Text-to-image diffusion models pre-trained on billions of image-text pairs have recently enabled 3D content creation by optimizing a randomly initialized differentiable 3D representation with score distillation. However, the optimization…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Yukun Huang , Jianan Wang , Yukai Shi , Boshi Tang , Xianbiao Qi , Lei Zhang

Inference-time alignment provides an efficient alternative for aligning LLMs with humans. However, these approaches still face challenges, such as limited scalability due to policy-specific value functions and latency during the inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ruizhe Chen , Wenhao Chai , Zhifei Yang , Xiaotian Zhang , Joey Tianyi Zhou , Tony Quek , Soujanya Poria , Zuozhu Liu

We address the problem of fine-tuning diffusion models for reward-guided generation in biomolecular design. While diffusion models have proven highly effective in modeling complex, high-dimensional data distributions, real-world…

Diffusion models generate samples through an iterative denoising process, guided by a neural network. While training the denoiser on real-world data is computationally demanding, the sampling procedure itself is more flexible. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Constant Bourdrez , Alexandre Vérine , Olivier Cappé

Flow and diffusion models produce high-quality samples, but adapting them to user preferences or constraints post-training remains costly and brittle, a challenge commonly called reward alignment. We argue that efficient reward alignment…

We propose a new finetuning method to provide pre-trained large language models (LMs) the ability to scale test-time compute through the diffusion framework. By increasing the number of diffusion steps, we show our finetuned models achieve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Edoardo Cetin , Tianyu Zhao , Yujin Tang

Diffusion models have demonstrated great potential in generating high-quality content for images, natural language, protein domains, etc. However, how to perform user-preferred targeted generation via diffusion models with only black-box…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-11 Yueming Lyu , Kim Yong Tan , Yew Soon Ong , Ivor W. Tsang

Aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models with preference optimization is valuable for human-annotated datasets, but the heavy cost of manual data collection limits scalability. Using reward models offers an alternative, however,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Kyungmin Lee , Xiaohang Li , Qifei Wang , Junfeng He , Junjie Ke , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Irfan Essa , Jinwoo Shin , Feng Yang , Yinxiao Li

Reward fine-tuning has become a common approach for aligning pretrained diffusion and flow models with human preferences in text-to-image generation. Among reward-gradient-based methods, Adjoint Matching (AM) provides a principled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jeongwoo Shin , Dongsoo Shin , Yuchen Zhu , Wei Guo , Yongxin Chen , Joonseok Lee , Jaewoong Choi , Jaemoo Choi