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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

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 have shown promising generative capabilities across diverse domains, yet aligning their outputs with desired reward functions remains a challenge, particularly in cases where reward functions are non-differentiable. Some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Xiner Li , Masatoshi Uehara , Xingyu Su , Gabriele Scalia , Tommaso Biancalani , Aviv Regev , Sergey Levine , Shuiwang Ji

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…

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

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

Denoising-based generative models, particularly diffusion and flow matching algorithms, have achieved remarkable success. However, aligning their output distributions with complex downstream objectives, such as human preferences,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Luozhijie Jin , Zijie Qiu , Jie Liu , Zijie Diao , Lifeng Qiao , Ning Ding , Alex Lamb , Xipeng Qiu

Diffusion models excel in generative tasks, but aligning them with specific objectives while maintaining their versatility remains challenging. Existing fine-tuning methods often suffer from reward over-optimization, while approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Sunwoo Kim , Minkyu Kim , Dongmin Park

Diffusion models and flow matching have demonstrated remarkable success in text-to-image generation. While many existing alignment methods primarily focus on fine-tuning pre-trained generative models to maximize a given reward function,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Yidong Ouyang , Liyan Xie , Hongyuan Zha , Guang Cheng

Adapting a pretrained diffusion model to new objectives at inference time remains an open problem in generative modeling. Existing steering methods suffer from inaccurate value estimation, especially at high noise levels, which biases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Vineet Jain , Kusha Sareen , Mohammad Pedramfar , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

In this work, we focus on the alignment problem of diffusion models with a continuous reward function, which represents specific objectives for downstream tasks, such as increasing darkness or improving the aesthetics of images. The central…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Zhiwei Tang , Jiangweizhi Peng , Jiasheng Tang , Mingyi Hong , Fan Wang , Tsung-Hui Chang

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 excel at capturing the natural design spaces of images, molecules, DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. However, rather than merely generating designs that are natural, we often aim to optimize downstream reward functions while…

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

Adapting pretrained diffusion models to downstream objectives such as inverse problems often requires expensive test-time guidance or optimization. We propose a principled framework for generating high-quality reward-aligned samples at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Kushagra Pandey , Farrin Marouf Sofian , Jan Niklas Groeneveld , Felix Draxler , Stephan Mandt

Reward-based fine-tuning steers a pretrained diffusion or flow-based generative model toward higher-reward samples while remaining close to the pretrained model. Although existing methods are derived from different perspectives, we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jeongjae Lee , Jinho Chang , Jeongsol Kim , Jong Chul Ye

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

Diffusion-based planning, learning, and control methods present a promising branch of powerful and expressive decision-making solutions. Given the growing interest, such methods have undergone numerous refinements over the past years.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Dom Huh , Prasant Mohapatra

Diffusion models have demonstrated empirical successes in various applications and can be adapted to task-specific needs via guidance. This paper studies a form of gradient guidance for adapting a pre-trained diffusion model towards…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-17 Yingqing Guo , Hui Yuan , Yukang Yang , Minshuo Chen , Mengdi Wang

Diffusion models have been successfully adapted to text generation tasks by mapping the discrete text into the continuous space. However, there exist nonnegligible gaps between training and inference, owing to the absence of the forward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Zecheng Tang , Pinzheng Wang , Keyan Zhou , Juntao Li , Ziqiang Cao , Min Zhang
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