English
Related papers

Related papers: Policy Gradient Guidance Enables Test Time Control

200 papers

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

Image generation using diffusion models have demonstrated outstanding learning capabilities, effectively capturing the full distribution of the training dataset. They are known to generate wide variations in sampled images, albeit with a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Rahul Shenoy , Zhihong Pan , Kaushik Balakrishnan , Qisen Cheng , Yongmoon Jeon , Heejune Yang , Jaewon Kim

Diffusion models for continuous data gained widespread adoption owing to their high quality generation and control mechanisms. However, controllable diffusion on discrete data faces challenges given that continuous guidance methods do not…

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a widely adopted technique in diffusion and flow-based generative models, enabling high-quality conditional generation. A key theoretical challenge is characterizing the distribution induced by CFG,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Krunoslav Lehman Pavasovic , Jakob Verbeek , Giulio Biroli , Marc Mezard

Classifier-free guidance has become a staple for conditional generation with denoising diffusion models. However, a comprehensive understanding of classifier-free guidance is still missing. In this work, we carry out an empirical study to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Xiaoming Zhao , Alexander G. Schwing

This paper presents a diffusion-based recommender system that incorporates classifier-free guidance. Most current recommender systems provide recommendations using conventional methods such as collaborative or content-based filtering.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Noah Buchanan , Susan Gauch , Quan Mai

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a widely used inference-time technique to boost the image quality of diffusion models. Yet, its reliance on text conditions prevents its use in unconditional generation. We propose a simple method to enable…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Weijia Zhang , Yuehao Liu , Shanyan Guan , Wu Ran , Yanhao Ge , Wei Li , Chao Ma

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hailang Huang , Xiao Zhang , Fei Wei , Yong Wang

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is widely used to improve conditional fidelity in diffusion models, but its impact on sampling dynamics remains poorly understood. Prior studies, often restricted to unimodal conditional distributions or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Cheng Jin , Qitan Shi , Yuantao Gu

Classifier free guidance has shown strong potential in diffusion-based reinforcement learning. However, existing methods rely on joint training of the guidance module and the diffusion model, which can be suboptimal during the early stages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Zhaoyang Chen , Cody Fleming

Adding additional control to pretrained diffusion models has become an increasingly popular research area, with extensive applications in computer vision, reinforcement learning, and AI for science. Recently, several studies have proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Yifei Shen , Xinyang Jiang , Yezhen Wang , Yifan Yang , Dongqi Han , Dongsheng Li

We introduce Group Policy Gradient (GPG), a family of critic-free policy-gradient estimators for general MDPs. Inspired by the success of GRPO's approach in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), GPG replaces a learned value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Junhua Chen , Zixi Zhang , Hantao Zhong , Rika Antonova

Temporal sequential tasks challenge humanoid robots, as existing Diffusion Policy (DP) and Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT) methods often lack temporal context, resulting in local optima traps and excessive repetitive actions. To…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yuang Lu , Song Wang , Xiao Han , Xuri Zhang , Yucong Wu , Zhicheng He

Guidance in conditional diffusion generation is of great importance for sample quality and controllability. However, existing guidance schemes are to be desired. On one hand, mainstream methods such as classifier guidance and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Jiajun Ma , Tianyang Hu , Wenjia Wang , Jiacheng Sun

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a cornerstone of text-to-image diffusion models, yet its effectiveness is limited by the use of static guidance scales. This "one-size-fits-all" approach fails to adapt to the diverse requirements of…

To sample from an unconditionally trained Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), classifier guidance adds conditional information during sampling, but the gradients from classifiers, especially those not trained on noisy images,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Philipp Vaeth , Alexander M. Fruehwald , Benjamin Paassen , Magda Gregorova

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) significantly enhances controllability in generative models by interpolating conditional and unconditional predictions. However, standard CFG often employs a static unconditional input, which can be suboptimal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Pengxiang Li , Shilin Yan , Joey Tsai , Renrui Zhang , Ruichuan An , Ziyu Guo , Xiaowei Gao

Diffusion models have emerged as a formidable tool for training-free conditional generation.However, a key hurdle in inference-time guidance techniques is the need for compute-heavy backpropagation through the diffusion network for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Nithin Gopalakrishnan Nair , Vishal M Patel

We propose Fractional Policy Gradients (FPG), a reinforcement learning framework incorporating fractional calculus for long-term temporal modeling in policy optimization. Standard policy gradient approaches face limitations from Markovian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Urvi Pawar , Kunal Telangi

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a widely used technique for improving conditional diffusion models by linearly combining the outputs of conditional and unconditional denoisers. While CFG enhances visual quality and improves alignment with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Badr Moufad , Yazid Janati , Alain Durmus , Ahmed Ghorbel , Eric Moulines , Jimmy Olsson