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Diffusion Models (DMs), as a leading class of generative models, offer key advantages for reinforcement learning (RL), including multi-modal expressiveness, stable training, and trajectory-level planning. This survey delivers a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Changfu Xu , Jianxiong Guo , Yuzhu Liang , Haiyang Huang , Haodong Zou , Xi Zheng , Shui Yu , Xiaowen Chu , Jiannong Cao , Tian Wang

Learning rewards from expert videos offers an affordable and effective solution to specify the intended behaviors for reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. In this work, we propose Diffusion Reward, a novel framework that learns rewards from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Tao Huang , Guangqi Jiang , Yanjie Ze , Huazhe Xu

Current mainstream methods of aligning diffusion models with human preferences typically employ VLM-based reward models. However, these reward models, pre-trained for semantic alignment, struggle to capture the essential perceptual…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jaxon Zhang , Binxin Yang , Hubery Yin , Chen Li , Jing Lyu

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

Diffusion models excel at modeling complex and multimodal trajectory distributions for decision-making and control. Reward-gradient guided denoising has been recently proposed to generate trajectories that maximize both a differentiable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Brian Yang , Huangyuan Su , Nikolaos Gkanatsios , Tsung-Wei Ke , Ayush Jain , Jeff Schneider , Katerina Fragkiadaki

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods harness previous experiences to derive an optimal policy, forming the foundation for pre-trained large-scale models (PLMs). When encountering tasks not seen before, PLMs often utilize several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Shengchao Hu , Wanru Zhao , Weixiong Lin , Li Shen , Ya Zhang , Dacheng Tao

Reaction-diffusion systems offer a powerful framework for understanding self-organized patterns in biological systems, yet controlling these patterns remains a significant challenge. As a consequence, we present a rigorous framework of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-13 Mohamed Amine Ouchdiri , Hamza Faquir , Saad Benjelloun , Mohamed Adlene Maghenem , Irene Otero-Muras , Adnane Saoud

Sequential decision-making is desired to align with human intents and exhibit versatility across various tasks. Previous methods formulate it as a conditional generation process, utilizing return-conditioned diffusion models to directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Xudong Yu , Chenjia Bai , Haoran He , Changhong Wang , Xuelong Li

Mathematical and computational tools have proven to be reliable in decision-making processes. In recent times, in particular, machine learning-based methods are becoming increasingly popular as advanced support tools. When dealing with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-23 Christina Schenk , Aditya Vasudevan , Maciej Haranczyk , Ignacio Romero

Diffusion and flow models achieve State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) generative performance, yet many practically important behaviors such as fine-grained prompt fidelity, compositional correctness, and text rendering are weakly specified by score or…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Yuanzhi Zhu , Xi Wang , Stéphane Lathuilière , Vicky Kalogeiton

In this note, we reflect on several fundamental connections among widely used post-training techniques. We clarify some intimate connections and equivalences between reinforcement learning with human feedback, reinforcement learning with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-05 Yuchen Jiao , Yuxin Chen , Gen Li

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of directly aligning diffusion models with human preferences using differentiable reward. However, they exhibit two primary challenges: (1) they rely on multistep denoising with gradient…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Xiangwei Shen , Zhimin Li , Zhantao Yang , Shiyi Zhang , Yingfang Zhang , Donghao Li , Chunyu Wang , Qinglin Lu , Yansong Tang

We introduce iterative tilting, a gradient-free method for fine-tuning diffusion models toward reward-tilted distributions. The method decomposes a large reward tilt $\exp(\lambda r)$ into $N$ sequential smaller tilts, each admitting a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-04 Jean Pachebat , Giovanni Conforti , Alain Durmus , Yazid Janati

Aligning Diffusion models has achieved remarkable breakthroughs in generating high-quality, human preference-aligned images. Existing techniques, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and DPO-style preference optimization, have become…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zening Sun , Zhengpeng Xie , Lichen Bai , Shitong Shao , Shuo Yang , Zeke Xie

Diffusion models surpass previous generative models in sample quality and training stability. Recent works have shown the advantages of diffusion models in improving reinforcement learning (RL) solutions. This survey aims to provide an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Zhengbang Zhu , Hanye Zhao , Haoran He , Yichao Zhong , Shenyu Zhang , Haoquan Guo , Tingting Chen , Weinan Zhang

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn optimal policies from previously collected datasets. Recently, due to their powerful representational capabilities, diffusion models have shown significant potential as policy models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Tianle Zhang , Jiayi Guan , Lin Zhao , Yihang Li , Dongjiang Li , Zecui Zeng , Lei Sun , Yue Chen , Xuelong Wei , Lusong Li , Xiaodong He

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in image generation, and have similarly been used to learn high-performing policies in sequential decision-making tasks. Decision-making diffusion models can be trained on lower-quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Felipe Nuti , Tim Franzmeyer , João F. Henriques

While one commonly trains large diffusion models by collecting datasets on target downstream tasks, it is often desired to align and finetune pretrained diffusion models with some reward functions that are either designed by experts or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zhen Liu , Tim Z. Xiao , Weiyang Liu , Yoshua Bengio , Dinghuai Zhang