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Diffusion distillation, exemplified by Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), has shown great promise in few-step generation but often sacrifices quality for sampling speed. While integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL) into distillation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Linwei Dong , Ruoyu Guo , Ge Bai , Zehuan Yuan , Yawei Luo , Changqing Zou

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 has been widely applied to diffusion and flow models for visual tasks such as text-to-image generation. However, these tasks remain challenging because diffusion models have intractable likelihoods, which creates a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jaemoo Choi , Yuchen Zhu , Wei Guo , Petr Molodyk , Bo Yuan , Jinbin Bai , Yi Xin , Molei Tao , Yongxin Chen

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 excel at modeling complex data distributions, including those of images, proteins, and small molecules. However, in many cases, our goal is to model parts of the distribution that maximize certain properties: for example,…

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

Recently, a new paradigm named \emph{drifting model} has been proposed for mapping distributions, which achieves the SOTA image generation performance over ImageNet via one-step neural functional evaluation (NFE). The basic idea is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Guoqiang Zhang , Kenta Niwa , W. Bastiaan Kleijn

Preference optimization has emerged as an efficient alternative to online reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning text-to-image diffusion models. However, existing methods largely reduce supervision to binary pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Austin Wang , Jiaqi Han , Stefano Ermon , Yisong Yue

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human preferences, inspiring the development of reward-centric diffusion reinforcement learning (RDRL) to achieve similar…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Kwanyoung Kim , Byeongsu Sim

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

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

Diffusion models have shown remarkable performance in generation problems over various domains including images, videos, text, and audio. A practical bottleneck of diffusion models is their sampling speed, due to the repeated evaluation of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Taehong Moon , Moonseok Choi , EungGu Yun , Jongmin Yoon , Gayoung Lee , Jaewoong Cho , Juho Lee

Ambiguity in medical image segmentation calls for models that capture full conditional distributions rather than a single point estimate. We present Prior-Guided Residual Diffusion (PGRD), a diffusion-based framework that learns voxel-wise…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Fuyou Mao , Beining Wu , Yanfeng Jiang , Han Xue , Yan Tang , Hao Zhang

Recent advances in denoising diffusion models have enabled rapid generation of optimized structures for topology optimization. However, these models often rely on surrogate predictors to enforce physical constraints, which may fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Euihyun Kim , Keun Park , Yeoneung Kim

Distillation addresses the slow sampling problem in diffusion models by creating models with smaller size or fewer steps that approximate the behavior of high-step teachers. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Amirhossein Tighkhorshid , Zahra Dehghanian , Gholamali Aminian , Chengchun Shi , Hamid R. Rabiee

Discrete diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful class of generative models for chemistry and biology data. In these fields, the goal is to generate various samples with high rewards (e.g., drug-likeness in molecules), making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Prin Phunyaphibarn , Minhyuk Sung

We explore the methodology and theory of reward-directed generation via conditional diffusion models. Directed generation aims to generate samples with desired properties as measured by a reward function, which has broad applications in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-17 Hui Yuan , Kaixuan Huang , Chengzhuo Ni , Minshuo Chen , Mengdi Wang

Diffusion models are a powerful generative framework, but come with expensive inference. Existing acceleration methods often compromise image quality or fail under complex conditioning when operating in an extremely low-step regime. In this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Jonas Kohler , Albert Pumarola , Edgar Schönfeld , Artsiom Sanakoyeu , Roshan Sumbaly , Peter Vajda , Ali Thabet

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative tools across various domains, yet tailoring pre-trained models to exhibit specific desirable properties remains challenging. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Fengyuan Dai , Zifeng Zhuang , Yufei Huang , Siteng Huang , Bangyan Liao , Donglin Wang , Fajie Yuan

Classifier-guided diffusion models have emerged as a powerful approach for conditional image generation, but they suffer from overconfident predictions during early denoising steps, causing the guidance gradient to vanish. This paper…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Seyed Alireza Javid , Amirhossein Bagheri , Nuria González-Prelcic