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We present Direct Reward Fine-Tuning (DRaFT), a simple and effective method for fine-tuning diffusion models to maximize differentiable reward functions, such as scores from human preference models. We first show that it is possible to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Kevin Clark , Paul Vicol , Kevin Swersky , David J Fleet

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, but extending these methods to diffusion language models (DLMs) is challenging due to intractable sequence-level likelihoods. Existing…

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

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in text-to-image generation. However, their practical applications are hindered by the misalignment between generated images and corresponding text prompts. To tackle this issue,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Zijing Hu , Fengda Zhang , Long Chen , Kun Kuang , Jiahui Li , Kaifeng Gao , Jun Xiao , Xin Wang , Wenwu Zhu

Recent GRPO-based approaches built on flow matching models have shown remarkable improvements in human preference alignment for text-to-image generation. Nevertheless, they still suffer from the sparse reward problem: the terminal reward of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Haoyou Deng , Keyu Yan , Chaojie Mao , Xiang Wang , Yu Liu , Changxin Gao , Nong Sang

Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Adam Fisch , Jacob Eisenstein , Vicky Zayats , Alekh Agarwal , Ahmad Beirami , Chirag Nagpal , Pete Shaw , Jonathan Berant

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

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

Diffusion models are a class of flexible generative models trained with an approximation to the log-likelihood objective. However, most use cases of diffusion models are not concerned with likelihoods, but instead with downstream objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-08 Kevin Black , Michael Janner , Yilun Du , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

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 models have achieved remarkable success in generating realistic and versatile images from text prompts. Inspired by the recent advancements of language models, there is an increasing interest in further improving the models by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Binxu Li , Minkai Xu , Jiaqi Han , Meihua Dang , Stefano Ermon

Aligning diffusion models with user preferences has been a key challenge. Existing methods for aligning diffusion models either require retraining or are limited to differentiable reward functions. To address these limitations, we propose a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Po-Hung Yeh , Kuang-Huei Lee , Jun-Cheng Chen

Direct preference optimization (DPO) methods have shown strong potential in aligning text-to-image diffusion models with human preferences by training on paired comparisons. These methods improve training stability by avoiding the REINFORCE…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yi-Lun Wu , Bo-Kai Ruan , Chiang Tseng , Hong-Han Shuai

This tutorial provides an in-depth guide on inference-time guidance and alignment methods for optimizing downstream reward functions in diffusion models. While diffusion models are renowned for their generative modeling capabilities,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Masatoshi Uehara , Yulai Zhao , Chenyu Wang , Xiner Li , Aviv Regev , Sergey Levine , Tommaso Biancalani

Diffusion models have shown remarkable success in text-to-image generation, making preference alignment for these models increasingly important. The preference labels are typically available only at the terminal of denoising trajectories,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Dingyuan Shi , Yong Wang , Hangyu Li , Xiangxiang Chu

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 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

Recent advances in one-step text-to-image generation have enabled real-time synthesis with remarkable efficiency and quality. Previous reinforcement learning methods for one-step generators combine image-space reward optimization with…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Junyi Wu , Weijian Luo , Haoyang Zheng , Ruizhe Zhang , Guang Lin

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

Without using explicit reward, direct preference optimization (DPO) employs paired human preference data to fine-tune generative models, a method that has garnered considerable attention in large language models (LLMs). However, exploration…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Yunhong Lu , Qichao Wang , Hengyuan Cao , Xierui Wang , Xiaoyin Xu , Min Zhang