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Optimal control of diffusion processes is intimately connected to the problem of solving certain Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations. Building on recent machine learning inspired approaches towards high-dimensional PDEs, we investigate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-31 Nikolas Nüsken , Lorenz Richter

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 study the problem of computing the value function from a discretely-observed trajectory of a continuous-time diffusion process. We develop a new class of algorithms based on easily implementable numerical schemes that are compatible with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Wenlong Mou , Yuhua Zhu

Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz

Fine-tuning foundation models via reinforcement learning (RL) has proven promising for aligning to downstream objectives. In the case of diffusion models (DMs), though RL training improves alignment from early timesteps, critical issues…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-14 Roberto Barceló , Cristóbal Alcázar , Felipe Tobar

Diffusion models excel at modeling complex data distributions, including those of images, proteins, and small molecules. However, in many cases, our goal is to model parts of the distribution that maximize certain properties: for example,…

The solution to a stochastic optimal control problem can be determined by computing the value function from a discretization of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. Alternatively, the problem can be reformulated in terms of a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-29 Sebastian Reich

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for generative modeling, demonstrating exceptional capability in capturing target data distributions from large datasets. However, fine-tuning these massive models for specific downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Yinbin Han , Meisam Razaviyayn , Renyuan Xu

Despite impressive results, reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from slow convergence and requires a large variety of tuning strategies. In this paper, we investigate the ability of RL algorithms on simple continuous control tasks. We show…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Daniel Layeghi , Steve Tonneau , Michael Mistry

Continuous-time reinforcement learning offers an appealing formalism for describing control problems in which the passage of time is not naturally divided into discrete increments. Here we consider the problem of predicting the distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Harley Wiltzer , David Meger , Marc G. Bellemare

We investigate an optimal control problem for a diffusion whose drift and running cost are merely measurable in the state variable. Such low regularity rules out the use of Pontryagin's maximum principle and also invalidates the standard…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-03 Kai Du , Qingmeng Wei

In this paper, we study the optimal dividend problem under the continuous time diffusion model with the bounded dividend rate from the Reinforcement Learning (RL) perspective. Unlike the standard literature, our main focus will be on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-30 Lihua Bai , Thejani Gamage , Jin Ma , Gaozhan Wang

We establish a connection between stochastic optimal control and generative models based on stochastic differential equations (SDEs), such as recently developed diffusion probabilistic models. In particular, we derive a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Julius Berner , Lorenz Richter , Karen Ullrich

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…

This paper studies the optimal dividend problem with a bounded payout rate in a partially observed regime-switching diffusion model, where, in practice, the market regime is unobserved and key model parameters are unknown. To address this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-29 Zhongqin Gao , Yan Lv , Jingmin He

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 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

Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Matthias Schultheis , Constantin A. Rothkopf , Heinz Koeppl

We introduce a new numerical method to approximate the solution of a finite horizon deterministic optimal control problem. We exploit two Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman PDE, arising by considering the dynamics in forward and backward time. This…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-21 Marianne Akian , Stéphane Gaubert , Shanqing Liu

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
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