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Related papers: Test-time scaling of diffusions with flow maps

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The performance of text-to-image diffusion models may be improved at test-time by scaling computation to search for a generated image that maximizes a given reward function. While existing trajectory level exploration methods improve the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Qingtao Yu , Changlin Song , Minghao Sun , Zhengyang Yu , Vinay Kumar Verma , Soumya Roy , Sumit Negi , Hongdong Li , Dylan Campbell

We introduce iterative tilting, a gradient-free method for fine-tuning diffusion models toward reward-tilted distributions. The method decomposes a large reward tilt $\exp(\lambda r)$ into $N$ sequential smaller tilts, each admitting a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-04 Jean Pachebat , Giovanni Conforti , Alain Durmus , Yazid Janati

In generative modeling, we often wish to produce samples that maximize a user-specified reward such as aesthetic quality or alignment with human preferences, a problem known as \textit{guidance}. Despite their widespread use, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Jerry Y. Huang , Justin Lin , Sheel Shah , Kartik Nair , Nicholas M. Boffi

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

The new paradigm of test-time scaling has yielded remarkable breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) (e.g. reasoning models) and in generative vision models, allowing models to allocate additional computation during inference to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Luca Eyring , Shyamgopal Karthik , Alexey Dosovitskiy , Nataniel Ruiz , Zeynep Akata

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

Adapting a pretrained diffusion model to new objectives at inference time remains an open problem in generative modeling. Existing steering methods suffer from inaccurate value estimation, especially at high noise levels, which biases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Vineet Jain , Kusha Sareen , Mohammad Pedramfar , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

Diffusion models and flow matching have demonstrated remarkable success in text-to-image generation. While many existing alignment methods primarily focus on fine-tuning pre-trained generative models to maximize a given reward function,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Yidong Ouyang , Liyan Xie , Hongyuan Zha , Guang Cheng

We propose a simple, scalable algorithm for using stochastic interpolants to sample from unnormalized densities and for fine-tuning generative models. The approach, Tilt Matching, arises from a dynamical equation relating the flow matching…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-29 Peter Potaptchik , Cheuk-Kit Lee , Michael S. Albergo

Reward-based fine-tuning steers a pretrained diffusion or flow-based generative model toward higher-reward samples while remaining close to the pretrained model. Although existing methods are derived from different perspectives, we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jeongjae Lee , Jinho Chang , Jeongsol Kim , Jong Chul Ye

Diffusion models produce impressive results in modalities ranging from images and video to protein design and text. However, generating samples with user-specified properties remains a challenge. Recent research proposes fine-tuning models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Raghav Singhal , Zachary Horvitz , Ryan Teehan , Mengye Ren , Zhou Yu , Kathleen McKeown , Rajesh Ranganath

The iterative and stochastic nature of diffusion models enables test-time scaling, whereby spending additional compute during denoising generates higher-fidelity samples. Increasing the number of denoising steps is the primary scaling axis,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Vignav Ramesh , Morteza Mardani

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…

We study the problem of training diffusion and flow generative models to sample from target distributions defined by an exponential tilting of a base density; a formulation that subsumes both sampling from unnormalized densities and reward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-04 Carles Domingo-Enrich , Yuanqi Du , Michael S. Albergo

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in image generation, and have similarly been used to learn high-performing policies in sequential decision-making tasks. Decision-making diffusion models can be trained on lower-quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Felipe Nuti , Tim Franzmeyer , João F. Henriques

Test-time scaling through reward-guided generation remains largely unexplored for discrete diffusion models despite its potential as a promising alternative. In this work, we introduce Iterative Reward-Guided Refinement (IterRef), a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sanghyun Lee , Sunwoo Kim , Seungryong Kim , Jongho Park , Dongmin Park

The efficient Test-Time Scaling (TTS) paradigm offers a promising perspective for enhancing the generation performance of diffusion models. However, current solutions are limited to a static, pre-defined noise pool and suffer from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Gang Dai , Yining Huang , Yiming Xia , Guohao Chen , Shuaicheng Niu

We present a mechanism to steer the sampling diversity of denoising diffusion and flow matching models, allowing users to sample from a sharper or broader distribution than the training distribution. We build on the observation that these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yanbo Xu , Yu Wu , Sungjae Park , Zhizhuo Zhou , Shubham Tulsiani

Diffusion- and flow-based models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative modeling approaches, but they require many sampling steps. Consistency models can distill these models into efficient one-step generators; however, unlike flow-…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Amirmojtaba Sabour , Sanja Fidler , Karsten Kreis

Although diffusion-based real-world image restoration (Real-IR) has achieved remarkable progress, efficiently leveraging ultra-large-scale pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models and fully exploiting their potential remain significant…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Purui Bai , Junxian Duan , Pin Wang , Jinhua Hao , Ming Sun , Chao Zhou , Huaibo Huang
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