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Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for aligning diffusion models with human preferences, typically by optimizing a single reward function under a KL regularization constraint. In practice, however, human preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Qi Zhang , Dawei Wang , Shaofeng Zou

This work studies reinforcement learning (RL) in the context of multi-period supply chains subject to constraints, e.g., on production and inventory. We introduce Distributional Constrained Policy Optimization (DCPO), a novel approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jaime Sabal Bermúdez , Antonio del Rio Chanona , Calvin Tsay

Bridging the gap between diffusion models and human preferences is crucial for their integration into practical generative workflows. While optimizing downstream reward models has emerged as a promising alignment strategy, concerns arise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Ziyi Zhang , Sen Zhang , Yibing Zhan , Yong Luo , Yonggang Wen , Dacheng Tao

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of directly aligning diffusion models with human preferences using differentiable reward. However, they exhibit two primary challenges: (1) they rely on multistep denoising with gradient…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Xiangwei Shen , Zhimin Li , Zhantao Yang , Shiyi Zhang , Yingfang Zhang , Donghao Li , Chunyu Wang , Qinglin Lu , Yansong Tang

Preference-based finetuning of vision--language models (VLMs) is brittle: trivially wrong negatives inject uninformative gradients that destabilize training. We recast alignment as \textbf{learning-dynamics--aware optimization} and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Jusheng Zhang , Kaitong Cai , Jing Yang , Keze Wang

While Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs), such as LLaDA, present a promising paradigm for language modeling, there has been relatively little effort in aligning these models with human preferences via reinforcement learning. The challenge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Fengqi Zhu , Rongzhen Wang , Shen Nie , Xiaolu Zhang , Chunwei Wu , Jun Hu , Jun Zhou , Jianfei Chen , Yankai Lin , Ji-Rong Wen , Chongxuan Li

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been popular for aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models with human preferences. As a mainstream branch of RLHF, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) offers a computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Jiaming Hu , Jiamu Bai , Haoyu Wang , Debarghya Mukherjee , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL), particularly Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has become the dominant paradigm for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). While policy ratio clipping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Yu Luo , Shuo Han , Yihan Hu , Dong Li , Jianye Hao

Video diffusion models (VDMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in text-to-video (T2V) generation. Despite their success, VDMs still suffer from degraded image quality and flickering artifacts. To address these issues, some…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Jiacheng Zhang , Jie Wu , Weifeng Chen , Yatai Ji , Xuefeng Xiao , Weilin Huang , Kai Han

Diffusion models have made substantial advances in image generation, yet models trained on large, unfiltered datasets often yield outputs misaligned with human preferences. Numerous methods have been proposed to fine-tune pre-trained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Fu-Yun Wang , Yunhao Shui , Jingtan Piao , Keqiang Sun , Hongsheng Li

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is highly effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, yet its direct application to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) often triggers reward collapse. We identify two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jianyuan Zhong , Kaibo Wang , Ding Ding , Zijin Feng , Haoli Bai , Yang Xiang , Jiacheng Sun , Qiang Xu

We propose a sampling-based framework for finite-horizon trajectory and policy optimization under differentiable dynamics by casting controller design as inference. Specifically, we minimize a KL-regularized expected trajectory cost, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Heng Yang

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a predominant alignment method for diffusion models, facilitating off-policy training without explicit reward modeling. However, its reliance on large-scale, high-quality human preference…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Khiem Pham , Quang Nguyen , Tung Nguyen , Jingsen Zhu , Michele Santacatterina , Dimitris Metaxas , Ramin Zabih

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow us to combine model-generated data with those collected from interaction with the real system in order to alleviate the data efficiency problem in RL. However, designing such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Yinlam Chow , Brandon Cui , MoonKyung Ryu , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Recent work uses reinforcement learning (RL) to fine-tune text-to-image diffusion models, improving text-image alignment and sample quality. However, existing approaches introduce unnecessary complexity: they cache the full sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Yanting Miao , William Loh , Pacal Poupart , Suraj Kothawade

The rapid development of large language model (LLM) alignment algorithms has resulted in a complex and fragmented landscape, with limited clarity on the effectiveness of different methods and their inter-connections. This paper introduces…

Diffusion language models (dLLMs) are an emerging alternative to autoregressive (AR) generators, but aligning them to human preferences is challenging because sequence log-likelihoods are intractable and pairwise preference data are costly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Vaibhav Jindal , Hejian Sang , Chun-Mao Lai , Yanning Chen , Zhipeng Wang

Aligning large language models with human preferences has emerged as a critical focus in language modeling research. Yet, integrating preference learning into Text-to-Image (T2I) generative models is still relatively uncharted territory.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Yi Gu , Zhendong Wang , Yueqin Yin , Yujia Xie , Mingyuan Zhou

Most Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) adopt preference alignment techniques, e.g., DPO~\citep{rafailov2024dpo}, to optimize the reward margin between a winning response ($y_w$) and a losing response ($y_l$). However, the likelihood…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Xiaodong Wang , Jinfa Huang , Li Yuan , Peixi Peng

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee