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To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Solving storage problem: where objects must be accurately placed into containers with precise orientations and positions, presents a distinct challenge that extends beyond traditional rearrangement tasks. These challenges are primarily due…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Haonan Chang , Kowndinya Boyalakuntla , Yuhan Liu , Xinyu Zhang , Liam Schramm , Abdeslam Boularias

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…

Drawing upon recent advances in language model alignment, we formulate offline Reinforcement Learning as a two-stage optimization problem: First pretraining expressive generative policies on reward-free behavior datasets, then fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Huayu Chen , Kaiwen Zheng , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

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,…

Diffusion models have recently shown promise in offline RL. However, these methods often suffer from high training costs and slow convergence, particularly when using transformer-based denoising backbones. While several optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Zhiying Qiu , Tao Lin

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

Preference learning has garnered extensive attention as an effective technique for aligning diffusion models with human preferences in visual generation. However, existing alignment approaches such as Diffusion-DPO suffer from two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xiaomeng Yang , Mengping Yang , Junyan Wang , Zhijian Zhou , Zhiyu Tan , Hao Li

Preference optimization for diffusion and flow-matching models relies on reward functions that are both discriminatively robust and computationally efficient. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as the primary reward provider,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Gongye Liu , Bo Yang , Yida Zhi , Zhizhou Zhong , Lei Ke , Didan Deng , Han Gao , Yongxiang Huang , Kaihao Zhang , Hongbo Fu , Wenhan Luo

Recent studies have demonstrated the strong empirical performance of diffusion models on discrete sequences across domains from natural language to biological sequence generation. For example, in the protein inverse folding task,…

Diffusion models have demonstrated strong generative performance; however, generated samples often fail to fully align with human intent. This paper studies a test-time scaling method that enables sampling from regions with higher…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Yeongmin Kim , Donghyeok Shin , Byeonghu Na , Minsang Park , Richard Lee Kim , Il-Chul Moon

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

Diffusion Models represent a significant advancement in generative modeling, employing a dual-phase process that first degrades domain-specific information via Gaussian noise and restores it through a trainable model. This framework enables…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Benedikt Hartl , Yanbo Zhang , Hananel Hazan , Michael Levin

Decision-focused learning (DFL) integrates predictive modeling and optimization by training predictors to optimize the downstream decision target rather than merely minimizing prediction error. To date, existing DFL methods typically rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zihao Zhao , Christopher Yeh , Lingkai Kong , Kai Wang

Evolutionary algorithms have been successful in solving multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs). However, as a class of population-based search methodology, evolutionary algorithms require a large number of evaluations of the objective…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Xueming Yan , Yaochu Jin

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…

Text-to-image diffusion models have recently emerged at the forefront of image generation, powered by very large-scale unsupervised or weakly supervised text-to-image training datasets. Due to their unsupervised training, controlling their…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Mihir Prabhudesai , Anirudh Goyal , Deepak Pathak , Katerina Fragkiadaki

Current reinforcement learning objectives for large-model reasoning primarily focus on maximizing expected rewards. This paradigm can lead to overfitting to dominant reward signals, while neglecting alternative yet valid reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Wendi Li , Sharon Li

We study reinforcement learning for controlled diffusion processes with unbounded continuous state spaces, bounded continuous actions, and polynomially growing rewards: settings that arise naturally in finance, economics, and operations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Hanqing Jin , Renyuan Xu , Yanzhao Yang

Aligning generative diffusion models with human preferences via reinforcement learning (RL) is critical yet challenging. Most existing algorithms are often vulnerable to reward hacking, such as quality degradation, over-stylization, or…