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Generative models such as diffusion have been employed as world models in offline reinforcement learning to generate synthetic data for more effective learning. Existing work either generates diffusion models one-time prior to training or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Zeyu Fang , Tian Lan

Language model alignment is a critical step in training modern generative language models. Alignment targets to improve win rate of a sample from the aligned model against the base model. Today, we are increasingly using inference-time…

Discrete diffusion models (DMs) have achieved strong performance in language and other discrete domains, offering a compelling alternative to autoregressive modeling. Yet this performance typically depends on large training datasets,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Julian Kleutgens , Claudio Battiloro , Lingkai Kong , Benjamin Grewe , Francesca Dominici , Mauricio Tec

Diffusion language models (DLMs) are an attractive alternative to autoregressive models because they promise sublinear-time, parallel generation, yet practical gains remain elusive as high-quality samples still demand hundreds of refinement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Hasan Amin , Yuan Gao , Yaser Souri , Subhojit Som , Ming Yin , Rajiv Khanna , Xia Song

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have mainly focused on improving final answer correctness and strengthening visual grounding. However, a critical…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Jinda Lu , Junkang Wu , Jinghan Li , Kexin Huang , Shuo Yang , Mingzhu Chen , Jiancan Wu , Kuien Liu , Xiang Wang

Diffusion-based language models (DLLMs) offer non-sequential, block-wise generation and richer data reuse compared to autoregressive (AR) models, but existing code DLLMs still lag behind strong AR baselines under comparable budgets. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Chenghao Fan , Wen Heng , Bo Li , Sichen Liu , Yuxuan Song , Jing Su , Xiaoye Qu , Kai Shen , Wei Wei

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have inspired new paradigms for document reranking. While this paradigm better exploits the reasoning and contextual understanding capabilities of LLMs, most existing LLM-based rerankers rely…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Qi Liu , Kun Ai , Jiaxin Mao , Yanzhao Zhang , Mingxin Li , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Fengbin Zhu , Ji-Rong Wen

Training autonomous agents with sparse rewards is a long-standing problem in online reinforcement learning (RL), due to low data efficiency. Prior work overcomes this challenge by extracting useful knowledge from offline data, often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Qianlan Yang , Yu-Xiong Wang

Reward guidance, also known as posterior sampling, is a popular method for test-time adaptation and post-training in continuous diffusion models. In this paper, we study reward guidance for discrete diffusion language models; now, one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Atula Tejaswi , Litu Rout , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai , Sujay Sanghavi

We propose Diff-Instruct* (DI*), a data-efficient post-training approach for one-step text-to-image generative models to improve its human preferences without requiring image data. Our method frames alignment as online reinforcement…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Weijian Luo , Colin Zhang , Debing Zhang , Zhengyang Geng

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is the most prominent method for Language Model (LM) alignment. However, RLHF is an unstable and data-hungry process that continually requires new high-quality LM-generated data for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Ashutosh Baheti , Ximing Lu , Faeze Brahman , Ronan Le Bras , Maarten Sap , Mark Riedl

Autoregressive language models decode left-to-right with irreversible commitments, limiting revision during multi-step reasoning. We propose \textbf{VDLM}, a modular variable diffusion language model that separates semantic planning from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Shuhui Qu

Recent advancements have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The effectiveness of such RL training, however, depends critically on the exploration space…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haoyuan Wu , Hai Wang , Jiajia Wu , Jinxiang Ou , Keyao Wang , Weile Chen , Zihao Zheng , Bei Yu

While few-step generative models have enabled powerful image and video generation at significantly lower cost, generic reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms for few-step models remain an unsolved problem. Existing RL approaches for few-step…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yihong Luo , Tianyang Hu , Weijian Luo , Jing Tang

We propose a diffusion-based framework for prompt optimization that leverages Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) to iteratively refine system prompts through masked denoising. By conditioning on interaction traces, including user queries,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Shiyu Wang , Haolin Chen , Liangwei Yang , Jielin Qiu , Rithesh Murthy , Ming Zhu , Zixiang Chen , Silvio Savarese , Caiming Xiong , Shelby Heinecke , Huan Wang

Recent advancements adopt online reinforcement learning (RL) from LLMs to text-to-image rectified flow diffusion models for reward alignment. The use of group-level rewards successfully aligns the model with the targeted reward. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Yiyang Wang , Xi Chen , Xiaogang Xu , Yu Liu , Hengshuang Zhao

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer order-agnostic generation that can explore many possible decoding trajectories. However, current decoding methods commit to a single trajectory, limiting exploration in trajectory space. We introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Yangyi Shen , Tianjian Feng , Jiaqi Han , Wen Wang , Tianlang Chen , Chunhua Shen , Jure Leskovec , Stefano Ermon

Post-training has become central to turning pretrained large language models (LLMs) into aligned, capable, and deployable systems. Recent progress spans supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, reinforcement learning (RL),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Shiwan Zhao , Zhihu Wang , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Caiyue Xu , Chenfei Liu , Liting Zhang , Yuhang Jia , Yanzhe Zhang , Hualong Yu , Zichen Xu , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

While autoregressive (AR) Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated formidable reasoning capabilities in robotic tasks, their sequential decoding process often incurs high inference latency and may amplify error accumulation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ruiheng Wang , Shuanghao Bai , Haoran Zhang , Badong Chen , Xiangyu Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for aligning generative models with human preferences, but its prohibitive computational cost remains a major barrier to widespread adoption. We introduce \textbf{TreeGRPO}, a novel RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Zheng Ding , Weirui Ye