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Policy gradient is an efficient technique for improving a policy in a reinforcement learning setting. However, vanilla online variants are on-policy only and not able to take advantage of off-policy data. In this paper we describe a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-10 Brendan O'Donoghue , Remi Munos , Koray Kavukcuoglu , Volodymyr Mnih

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) succeeds in condition diffusion models that use a guidance scale to balance the influence of conditional and unconditional terms. A high guidance scale is used to enhance the performance of the conditional…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Kaiyu Song , Hanjiang Lai

Flow-based generative models have become a strong framework for high-quality generative modeling, yet pretrained models are rarely used in their vanilla conditional form: conditional samples without guidance often appear diffuse and lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Runlong Liao , Jian Yu , Baiyu Su , Chi Zhang , Lizhang Chen , Qiang Liu

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Paulo Rauber , Avinash Ummadisingu , Filipe Mutz , Juergen Schmidhuber

The policy gradient theorem (Sutton et al., 2000) prescribes the usage of a cumulative discounted state distribution under the target policy to approximate the gradient. Most algorithms based on this theorem, in practice, break this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Samuele Tosatto , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , A. Rupam Mahmood

Diffusion-based generative models have achieved remarkable success in image generation. Their guidance formulation allows an external model to plug-and-play control the generation process for various tasks without finetuning the diffusion…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Hyojun Go , Yunsung Lee , Jin-Young Kim , Seunghyun Lee , Myeongho Jeong , Hyun Seung Lee , Seungtaek Choi

We found that enforcing guidance throughout the sampling process is often counterproductive due to the model-fitting issue, where samples are 'tuned' to match the classifier's parameters rather than generalizing the expected condition. This…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Anh-Dung Dinh , Daochang Liu , Chang Xu

Deploying large, complex policies in the real world requires the ability to steer them to fit the needs of a situation. Most common steering approaches, like goal-conditioning, require training the robot policy with a distribution of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Maximilian Du , Shuran Song

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

Diffusion-based models for robotic control, including vision-language-action (VLA) and vision-action (VA) policies, have demonstrated significant capabilities. Yet their advancement is constrained by the high cost of acquiring large-scale…

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is widely used in diffusion models but often introduces over-contrast and over-saturation artifacts at higher guidance strengths. We present EP-CFG (Energy-Preserving Classifier-Free Guidance), which addresses…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Kai Zhang , Fujun Luan , Sai Bi , Jianming Zhang

In recent times, large datasets hinder efficient model training while also containing redundant concepts. Dataset distillation aims to synthesize compact datasets that preserve the knowledge of large-scale training sets while drastically…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Ayush Roy , Wei-Yang Alex Lee , Rudrasis Chakraborty , Vishnu Suresh Lokhande

Classifier-free guidance is a key component for enhancing the performance of conditional generative models across diverse tasks. While it has previously demonstrated remarkable improvements for the sample quality, it has only been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Qinqing Zheng , Matt Le , Neta Shaul , Yaron Lipman , Aditya Grover , Ricky T. Q. Chen

Score-based generative models require guidance in order to generate plausible, on-manifold samples. The most popular guidance method, Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), is only applicable in settings with labeled data and requires training an…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Eric Yeats , Darryl Hannan , Wilson Fearn , Timothy Doster , Henry Kvinge , Scott Mahan

Negative guidance -- explicitly suppressing unwanted attributes -- remains a fundamental challenge in diffusion models, particularly in few-step sampling regimes. While Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) works well in standard settings, it…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Dar-Yen Chen , Hmrishav Bandyopadhyay , Kai Zou , Yi-Zhe Song

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a fundamental tool in modern diffusion models for text-guided generation. Although effective, CFG has notable drawbacks. For instance, DDIM with CFG lacks invertibility, complicating image editing;…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Hyungjin Chung , Jeongsol Kim , Geon Yeong Park , Hyelin Nam , Jong Chul Ye

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in image and audio generation, largely due to Classifier-Free Guidance. However, the choice of guidance scale remains underexplored: a fixed scale often fails to generalize across prompts…

Sound · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xuanhao Zhang , Chang Li

We present Readout Guidance, a method for controlling text-to-image diffusion models with learned signals. Readout Guidance uses readout heads, lightweight networks trained to extract signals from the features of a pre-trained, frozen…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Grace Luo , Trevor Darrell , Oliver Wang , Dan B Goldman , Aleksander Holynski

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) has become an essential component of modern conditional diffusion models. Although highly effective in practice, the underlying mechanisms by which CFG enhances quality, detail, and prompt alignment are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Seyedmorteza Sadat , Tobias Vontobel , Farnood Salehi , Romann M. Weber

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable progress in image generation quality, especially when guidance is used to control the generative process. However, guidance requires a large amount of image-annotation pairs for training and is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Vincent Tao Hu , David W Zhang , Yuki M. Asano , Gertjan J. Burghouts , Cees G. M. Snoek