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There has been a flurry of activity around using pretrained diffusion models as informed data priors for solving inverse problems, and more generally around steering these models using reward models. Training-free methods like diffusion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Aayush Karan , Kulin Shah , Sitan Chen

This study presents a generative optimization framework that builds on a fine-tuned diffusion model and reward-directed sampling to generate high-performance engineering designs. The framework adopts a parametric representation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Hadi Keramati , Patrick Kirchen , Mohammed Hannan , Rajeev K. Jaiman

This paper addresses the challenge of achieving high-quality and fast image generation that aligns with complex human preferences. While recent advancements in diffusion models and distillation have enabled rapid generation, the effective…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Yihong Luo , Tianyang Hu , Weijian Luo , Kenji Kawaguchi , Jing Tang

The performance of pre-trained masked diffusion models is often constrained by their sampling procedure, which makes decisions irreversible and struggles in low-step generation regimes. We introduce a novel sampling algorithm that works…

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

We propose a new reinforcement learning (RL) formulation for training continuous-time score-based diffusion models for generative AI to generate samples that maximize reward functions while keeping the generated distributions close to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xuefeng Gao , Jiale Zha , Xun Yu Zhou

We present a concise derivation for several influential score-based diffusion models that relies on only a few textbook results. Diffusion models have recently emerged as powerful tools for generating realistic, synthetic signals --…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Chicago Y. Park , Michael T. McCann , Cristina Garcia-Cardona , Brendt Wohlberg , Ulugbek S. Kamilov

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

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

We study reinforcement learning for controlled diffusion processes with unbounded continuous state spaces, bounded continuous actions, and polynomially growing rewards: settings that arise naturally in finance, economics, and operations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Hanqing Jin , Renyuan Xu , Yanzhao Yang

Diffusion models excel at capturing complex data distributions, such as those of natural images and proteins. While diffusion models are trained to represent the distribution in the training dataset, we often are more concerned with other…

Sampling from the posterior is a key technical problem in Bayesian statistics. Rigorous guarantees are difficult to obtain for Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms of common use. In this paper, we study an alternative class of algorithms…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-08-26 Andrea Montanari , Yuchen Wu

Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPM) have shown remarkable efficacy in the synthesis of high-quality images. However, their inference process characteristically requires numerous, potentially hundreds, of iterative steps, which could…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Mingxiao Li , Tingyu Qu , Ruicong Yao , Wei Sun , Marie-Francine Moens

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

Recently, diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have achieved promising results in diverse generative tasks. A typical DPM framework includes a forward process that gradually diffuses the data distribution and a reverse process that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Tianyu Pang , Cheng Lu , Chao Du , Min Lin , Shuicheng Yan , Zhijie Deng

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 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

Score-based diffusion models have significantly advanced high-dimensional data generation across various domains, by learning a denoising oracle (or score) from datasets. From a Bayesian perspective, they offer a realistic modeling of data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Joan Bruna , Jiequn Han

This tutorial provides a comprehensive survey of methods for fine-tuning diffusion models to optimize downstream reward functions. While diffusion models are widely known to provide excellent generative modeling capability, practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Masatoshi Uehara , Yulai Zhao , Tommaso Biancalani , Sergey Levine

Sampling is ubiquitous in machine learning methodologies. Due to the growth of large datasets and model complexity, we want to learn and adapt the sampling process while training a representation. Towards achieving this grand goal, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Jason Xiaotian Dou , Alvin Qingkai Pan , Runxue Bao , Haiyi Harry Mao , Lei Luo , Zhi-Hong Mao