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Traditional preference tuning methods for LLMs/Visual Generative Models often rely solely on reward model labeling, which can be opaque, offer limited insights into the rationale behind preferences, and are prone to issues such as reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hanyang Zhao , Haoxian Chen , Yucheng Guo , Genta Indra Winata , Tingting Ou , Ziyu Huang , David D. Yao , Wenpin Tang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to autoregressive (AR) and diffusion models. However, extending RL to hybrid AR-diffusion frameworks remains challenging due to interleaved inference and noisy log-probability…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Xiaoxiao Ma , Jiachen Lei , Tianfei Ren , Jie Huang , Siming Fu , Aiming Hao , Jiahong Wu , Xiangxiang Chu , Feng Zhao

Fine-tuning pre-trained generative models with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as an effective approach for aligning outputs more closely with nuanced human preferences. In this paper, we investigate the application of Group…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Matteo Gallici , Haitz Sáez de Ocáriz Borde

On-policy reinforcement learning methods like GRPO suffer from mode collapse: they exhibit reduced solution diversity, concentrating probability mass on a single solution once discovered and ceasing exploration of alternative strategies. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Xiaozhe Li , Yang Li , Xinyu Fang , Shengyuan Ding , Peiji Li , Yongkang Chen , Yichuan Ma , Tianyi Lyu , Linyang Li , Dahua Lin , Qipeng Guo , Qingwen Liu , Kai Chen

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet current methods face key challenges in resource allocation and policy optimization dynamics: (i) uniform rollout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Yangyi Fang , Jiaye Lin , Xiaoliang Fu , Cong Qin , Haolin Shi , Chaowen Hu , Lu Pan , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

The probabilistic diffusion model (DM), generating content by inferencing through a recursive chain structure, has emerged as a powerful framework for visual generation. After pre-training on enormous data, the model needs to be properly…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Tao Ren , Zishi Zhang , Jingyang Jiang , Zehao Li , Shentao Qin , Yi Zheng , Guanghao Li , Qianyou Sun , Yan Li , Jiafeng Liang , Xinping Li , Yijie Peng

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has been shown to be an effective algorithm when an accurate reward model is available. However, such a highly reliable reward model is not available in many real-world tasks. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Yuki Ichihara , Yuu Jinnai , Tetsuro Morimura , Mitsuki Sakamoto , Ryota Mitsuhashi , Eiji Uchibe

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

AI-driven design problems, such as DNA/protein sequence design, are commonly tackled from two angles: generative modeling, which efficiently captures the feasible design space (e.g., natural images or biological sequences), and model-based…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has improved guided image generation with diffusion models by directly optimizing rewards that capture image quality, aesthetics, and instruction following capabilities. However, the resulting generative policies…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Owen Oertell , Jonathan D. Chang , Yiyi Zhang , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Diffusion language models (DLMs) enable parallel, order-agnostic generation with iterative refinement, offering a flexible alternative to autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, adapting reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Kevin Rojas , Jiahe Lin , Kashif Rasul , Anderson Schneider , Yuriy Nevmyvaka , Molei Tao , Wei Deng

Fine-tuning foundation models via reinforcement learning (RL) has proven promising for aligning to downstream objectives. In the case of diffusion models (DMs), though RL training improves alignment from early timesteps, critical issues…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-14 Roberto Barceló , Cristóbal Alcázar , Felipe Tobar

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), primarily driven by the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm, is a leading approach for enhancing the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Kangqi Ni , Zhen Tan , Zijie Liu , Pingzhi Li , Tianlong Chen

Latent diffusion models are the state-of-the-art for synthetic image generation. To align these models with human preferences, training the models using reinforcement learning on human feedback is crucial. Black et. al 2024 introduced…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Mo Kordzanganeh , Danial Keshvary , Nariman Arian

As language models become increasingly capable, users expect them to provide not only accurate responses but also behaviors aligned with diverse human preferences across a variety of scenarios. To achieve this, Reinforcement learning (RL)…

Diffusion models have been widely studied for removing unsafe content learned during pre-training. Existing methods require expensive supervised data, either unsafe-text paired with safe-image groundtruth or negative/positive image pairs,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Komal Kumar , Ankan Deria , Abhishek Basu , Fahad Shamshad , Hisham Cholakkal , Karthik Nandakumar

In offline reinforcement learning, value overestimation caused by out-of-distribution (OOD) actions significantly limits policy performance. Recently, diffusion models have been leveraged for their strong distribution-matching capabilities,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Yunchang Ma , Tenglong Liu , Yixing Lan , Xin Yin , Changxin Zhang , Xinglong Zhang , Xin Xu

Aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models with preference optimization is valuable for human-annotated datasets, but the heavy cost of manual data collection limits scalability. Using reward models offers an alternative, however,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Kyungmin Lee , Xiaohang Li , Qifei Wang , Junfeng He , Junjie Ke , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Irfan Essa , Jinwoo Shin , Feng Yang , Yinxiao Li

In recent years, Diffusion Models have become the new state-of-the-art in deep generative modeling, ending the long-time dominance of Generative Adversarial Networks. Inspired by the Regularization by Denoising principle, we introduce an…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-31 Pasquale Cascarano , Lorenzo Stacchio , Andrea Sebastiani , Alessandro Benfenati , Ulugbek S. Kamilov , Gustavo Marfia

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key driver of language model reasoning. Among RL algorithms, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is the de facto standard, avoiding the need for a critic by using per-prompt baselines and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Cheng Ge , Caitlyn Heqi Yin , Hao Liang , Jiawei Zhang