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

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Generative models have made significant impacts across various domains, largely due to their ability to scale during training by increasing data, computational resources, and model size, a phenomenon characterized by the scaling laws.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Nanye Ma , Shangyuan Tong , Haolin Jia , Hexiang Hu , Yu-Chuan Su , Mingda Zhang , Xuan Yang , Yandong Li , Tommi Jaakkola , Xuhui Jia , Saining Xie

Inference-time scaling has achieved remarkable success in language models, yet its adaptation to diffusion models remains underexplored. We observe that the efficacy of recent Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)-based methods largely stems from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Xun Su , Jianming Huang , Yang Yusen , Zhongxi Fang , Hiroyuki Kasai

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-based planners have emerged as a promising approach for human-like trajectory generation in autonomous driving. Recent works incorporate reinforcement fine-tuning to enhance the robustness of diffusion planners through…

Allocating extra computation at inference time has recently improved sample quality in large language models and diffusion-based image generation. In parallel, Flow Matching (FM) has gained traction in language, vision, and scientific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Adam Stecklov , Noah El Rimawi-Fine , Mathieu Blanchette

Adapting pretrained diffusion models to downstream objectives such as inverse problems often requires expensive test-time guidance or optimization. We propose a principled framework for generating high-quality reward-aligned samples at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Kushagra Pandey , Farrin Marouf Sofian , Jan Niklas Groeneveld , Felix Draxler , Stephan Mandt

Backpropagation-based approaches aim to align diffusion models with reward functions through end-to-end backpropagation of the reward gradient within the denoising chain, offering a promising perspective. However, due to the computational…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Xiefan Guo , Miaomiao Cui , Liefeng Bo , Di Huang

Diffusion models are widely used for generative tasks across domains. Given a pre-trained diffusion model, it is often desirable to fine-tune it further either to correct for errors in learning or to align with downstream applications.…

Video diffusion alignment has been heavily relied on scalar rewards. These rewards are typically derived from learned reward models in human preference datasets, requiring additional training and extensive collection. Moreover, scalar…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Yifan Wang , Yanyu Li , Gordon Guocheng Qian , Sergey Tulyakov , Yun Fu , Anil Kag

Diffusion models have shown promising generative capabilities across diverse domains, yet aligning their outputs with desired reward functions remains a challenge, particularly in cases where reward functions are non-differentiable. Some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Xiner Li , Masatoshi Uehara , Xingyu Su , Gabriele Scalia , Tommaso Biancalani , Aviv Regev , Sergey Levine , Shuiwang Ji

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been used recently to align diffusion models with downstream objectives such as aesthetic quality and text-image consistency by fine-tuning them to maximize a single reward function under a fixed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Min Cheng , Fatemeh Doudi , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Panganamala R. Kumar

We have made significant progress towards building foundational video diffusion models. As these models are trained using large-scale unsupervised data, it has become crucial to adapt these models to specific downstream tasks. Adapting…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Mihir Prabhudesai , Russell Mendonca , Zheyang Qin , Katerina Fragkiadaki , Deepak Pathak

The advancements in generative modeling, particularly the advent of diffusion models, have sparked a fundamental question: how can these models be effectively used for discriminative tasks? In this work, we find that generative models can…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Mihir Prabhudesai , Tsung-Wei Ke , Alexander C. Li , Deepak Pathak , Katerina Fragkiadaki

Inference-time algorithms are an emerging paradigm in which pre-trained models are used as subroutines to solve downstream tasks. Such algorithms have been proposed for tasks ranging from inverse problems and guided image generation to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ankur Moitra , Andrej Risteski , Dhruv Rohatgi

To fully leverage the capabilities of diffusion models, we are often interested in optimizing downstream reward functions during inference. While numerous algorithms for reward-guided generation have been recently proposed due to their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Masatoshi Uehara , Xingyu Su , Yulai Zhao , Xiner Li , Aviv Regev , Shuiwang Ji , Sergey Levine , Tommaso Biancalani

Diffusion models excel in generative tasks, but aligning them with specific objectives while maintaining their versatility remains challenging. Existing fine-tuning methods often suffer from reward over-optimization, while approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Sunwoo Kim , Minkyu Kim , Dongmin Park

Controlling generative models is computationally expensive. This is because optimal alignment with a reward function--whether via inference-time steering or fine-tuning--requires estimating the value function. This task demands access to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-22 Peter Potaptchik , Adhi Saravanan , Abbas Mammadov , Alvaro Prat , Michael S. Albergo , Yee Whye Teh

Diffusion and flow-based generative models have achieved remarkable success in domains such as image synthesis, video generation, and natural language modeling. In this work, we extend these advances to weight space learning by leveraging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Daniel Saragih , Deyu Cao , Tejas Balaji

While one commonly trains large diffusion models by collecting datasets on target downstream tasks, it is often desired to align and finetune pretrained diffusion models with some reward functions that are either designed by experts or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zhen Liu , Tim Z. Xiao , Weiyang Liu , Yoshua Bengio , Dinghuai Zhang

Diffusion and flow-matching models scale because pretraining is supervised regression: a clean sample is noised analytically, and a model regresses against a closed-form target. RL post-training aligns the model with a reward. In image…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Andreas Bergmeister , Stefanie Jegelka , Nikolas Nüsken , Carles Domingo-Enrich , Jakiw Pidstrigach