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Inference-time alignment techniques offer a lightweight alternative or complement to costly reinforcement learning, while enabling continual adaptation as alignment objectives and reward targets evolve. Existing theoretical analyses justify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ye Wang , Jing Liu , Toshiaki Koike-Akino

We address the problem of fine-tuning diffusion models for reward-guided generation in biomolecular design. While diffusion models have proven highly effective in modeling complex, high-dimensional data distributions, real-world…

Preference optimization for diffusion and flow-matching models relies on reward functions that are both discriminatively robust and computationally efficient. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as the primary reward provider,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Gongye Liu , Bo Yang , Yida Zhi , Zhizhou Zhong , Lei Ke , Didan Deng , Han Gao , Yongxiang Huang , Kaihao Zhang , Hongbo Fu , Wenhan Luo

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in image generation, and have similarly been used to learn high-performing policies in sequential decision-making tasks. Decision-making diffusion models can be trained on lower-quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Felipe Nuti , Tim Franzmeyer , João F. Henriques

A common recipe to improve diffusion models at test-time so that samples score highly against a user-specified reward is to introduce the gradient of the reward into the dynamics of the diffusion itself. This procedure is often ill posed,…

Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Adam Fisch , Jacob Eisenstein , Vicky Zayats , Alekh Agarwal , Ahmad Beirami , Chirag Nagpal , Pete Shaw , Jonathan Berant

Beam alignment is a key challenge in directional mmWave and THz systems, where narrow beams require accurate yet low-overhead training. Existing learning-based approaches typically predict a single beam and do not quantify uncertainty,…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-14 Esraa Fahmy Othman , Lina Bariah , Merouane Debbah

Reinforcement learning algorithms require many samples when solving complex hierarchical tasks with sparse and delayed rewards. For such complex tasks, the recently proposed RUDDER uses reward redistribution to leverage steps in the…

Reward design in reinforcement learning and optimal control is challenging. Preference-based alignment addresses this by enabling agents to learn rewards from ranked trajectory pairs provided by humans. However, existing methods often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Zhixian Xie , Haode Zhang , Yizhe Feng , Wanxin Jin

Preference alignment in diffusion models has primarily focused on benign human preferences (e.g., aesthetic). In this paper, we propose a novel perspective: framing unrestricted adversarial example generation as a problem of aligning with…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Kaixun Jiang , Zhaoyu Chen , Haijing Guo , Jinglun Li , Jiyuan Fu , Pinxue Guo , Hao Tang , Bo Li , Wenqiang Zhang

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in text-to-image generation. However, their practical applications are hindered by the misalignment between generated images and corresponding text prompts. To tackle this issue,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Zijing Hu , Fengda Zhang , Long Chen , Kun Kuang , Jiahui Li , Kaifeng Gao , Jun Xiao , Xin Wang , Wenwu Zhu

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) denotes a powerful family of algorithms for recovering a reward function justifying the behavior demonstrated by an expert agent. A well-known limitation of IRL is the ambiguity in the choice of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Alberto Maria Metelli , Filippo Lazzati , Marcello Restelli

We introduce a novel alignment method for diffusion models from distribution optimization perspectives while providing rigorous convergence guarantees. We first formulate the problem as a generic regularized loss minimization over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Ryotaro Kawata , Kazusato Oko , Atsushi Nitanda , Taiji Suzuki

Diffusion models have become a central paradigm for image and multimodal generation, yet their deployment raises persistent questions about alignment, safety, preference satisfaction, and robustness to misuse. This survey reviews recent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Preeti Lamba , Kiran Ravish , Ankita Kushwaha , Pawan Kumar

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

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

We propose a distributionally robust logistic regression model with an unfairness penalty that prevents discrimination with respect to sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity. This model is equivalent to a tractable convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Bahar Taskesen , Viet Anh Nguyen , Daniel Kuhn , Jose Blanchet

Diffusion alignment aims to optimize diffusion models for the downstream objective. While existing methods based on reinforcement learning or direct backpropagation achieve considerable success in maximizing rewards, they often suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Jaewoo Lee , Minsu Kim , Sanghyeok Choi , Inhyuck Song , Sujin Yun , Hyeongyu Kang , Woocheol Shin , Taeyoung Yun , Kiyoung Om , Jinkyoo Park

Learning from feedback has been shown to enhance the alignment between text prompts and images in text-to-image diffusion models. However, due to the lack of focus in feedback content, especially regarding the object type and quantity,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Xuexiang Niu , Jinping Tang , Lei Wang , Ge Zhu

Inference-time alignment for diffusion models aims to adapt a pre-trained reference diffusion model toward a target distribution without retraining the reference score network, thereby preserving the generative capacity of the reference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-05 Jinyuan Chang , Chenguang Duan , Yuling Jiao , Yi Xu , Jerry Zhijian Yang