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Discrete diffusion models have become highly effective across various domains. However, real-world applications often require the generative process to adhere to certain constraints. To this end, we propose a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zijing Ou , Chinmay Pani , Yingzhen Li

Numerous capability and safety techniques of Large Language Models (LLMs), including RLHF, automated red-teaming, prompt engineering, and infilling, can be cast as sampling from an unnormalized target distribution defined by a given reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Stephen Zhao , Rob Brekelmans , Alireza Makhzani , Roger Grosse

This tutorial provides an in-depth guide on inference-time guidance and alignment methods for optimizing downstream reward functions in diffusion models. While diffusion models are renowned for their generative modeling capabilities,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Masatoshi Uehara , Yulai Zhao , Chenyu Wang , Xiner Li , Aviv Regev , Sergey Levine , Tommaso Biancalani

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

Discrete diffusion models have emerged as powerful frameworks for generating structured categorical data. However, efficiently sampling from reward-tilted distributions remains a fundamental challenge. While Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jaihoon Kim , Taehoon Yoon , Prin Phunyaphibarn , Seungjun Kim , Morteza Mardani , Minhyuk Sung

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

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

This work presents self-rewarding sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), an inference-time scaling algorithm enabling effective sampling of masked diffusion language models (MDLMs). Our algorithm stems from the observation that most existing MDLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ziwei Luo , Ziqi Jin , Lei Wang , Lidong Bing , Thomas B. Schön

Test-time scaling through reward-guided generation remains largely unexplored for discrete diffusion models despite its potential as a promising alternative. In this work, we introduce Iterative Reward-Guided Refinement (IterRef), a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sanghyun Lee , Sunwoo Kim , Seungryong Kim , Jongho Park , Dongmin Park

Inference-time scaling has achieved remarkable success in language models, yet its adaptation to diffusion models remains underexplored. We observe that the efficacy of recent Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)-based methods largely stems from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Xun Su , Jianming Huang , Yang Yusen , Zhongxi Fang , Hiroyuki Kasai

We propose a novel sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for sampling from unnormalized target distributions based on a reverse denoising diffusion process. While recent diffusion-based samplers simulate the reverse diffusion using…

Computation · Statistics 2025-11-06 Luhuan Wu , Yi Han , Christian A. Naesseth , John P. Cunningham

Recent work has framed constrained text generation with autoregressive language models as a probabilistic inference problem. Among these, Zhao et al. (2024) introduced a promising approach based on twisted Sequential Monte Carlo, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Sooyeon Kim , Giung Nam , Byoungwoo Park , Juho Lee

Adapting pretrained diffusion models to downstream objectives such as inverse problems often requires expensive test-time guidance or optimization. We propose a principled framework for generating high-quality reward-aligned samples at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Kushagra Pandey , Farrin Marouf Sofian , Jan Niklas Groeneveld , Felix Draxler , Stephan Mandt

We address the problem of accurate, training-free guidance for conditional generation in trained diffusion models. Existing methods typically rely on point-estimates to approximate the posterior score, often resulting in biased…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Aidan Gleich , Scott C. Schmidler

Optimizing the noise samples of diffusion and flow models is an increasingly popular approach to align these models to target rewards at inference time. However, we observe that these approaches are usually restricted to differentiable or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Niklas Schweiger , Daniel Cremers , Karnik Ram

Reinforcement learning with stochastic optimal control offers a promising framework for diffusion fine-tuning, where a pre-trained diffusion model is optimized to generate paths that lead to a reward-tilted distribution. While these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Sophia Tang , Yuchen Zhu , Molei Tao , Pranam Chatterjee

Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) has driven many recent breakthroughs in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, scaling MCTS to parallel compute has proven challenging in practice which has motivated alternative planners like sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Joery A. de Vries , Jinke He , Yaniv Oren , Matthijs T. J. Spaan

Discrete diffusion models have recently emerged as strong alternatives to autoregressive language models, matching their performance through large-scale training. However, inference-time control remains relatively underexplored. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Meihua Dang , Jiaqi Han , Minkai Xu , Kai Xu , Akash Srivastava , Stefano Ermon

Inference-time scaling has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning capability of large language models. Among various approaches, Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) has become a particularly important framework,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Youheng Zhu , Yiping Lu

Many methods for machine learning rely on approximate inference from intractable probability distributions. Variational inference approximates such distributions by tractable models that can be subsequently used for approximate inference.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Oleg Arenz , Mingjun Zhong , Gerhard Neumann
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