arXiv Machine Learning

Optimizing Visual Generative Models via Distribution-wise Rewards

arXiv:2607. 02291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conventional reinforcement learning strategies for visual generation typically employ sample-wise reward functions, yet this practice frequently results in reward hacking that degrades image diversity and introduces visual anomalies.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Learning to Credit the Right Steps: Objective-aware Process Optimization for Visual Generation

The paper introduces Objective-aware Trajectory Credit Assignment (OTCA), a framework that refines reinforcement learning for diffusion-based visual generation. OTCA decomposes credit across denoising steps and allocates multiple reward signals adaptively, addressing the coarse, uniform reward assignment of existing GRPO pipelines. Experiments demonstrate that OTCA consistently enhances image and video generation quality across various metrics.

By Rui Li, Ke Hao, Yuanzhi Liang, Haibin Huang, Chi Zhang, Yun Gu, Xuelong Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Joint Alignment and Distillation for Video Generation via Sample-Guided Distribution Matching

The paper introduces DM-Align, a single-stage optimization framework that jointly performs distribution matching for distillation and aligns video generative models with human preferences. By deriving complementary gradient directions—one minimizing the gap between real and fake models and another guiding the model toward preferred samples—the method eliminates the need for separate reinforcement learning and distillation stages. Experiments on multiple foundational video models show that this sample-guided approach consistently outperforms both standalone variants and traditional two-stage pipelines.

By Jiuzhou Lin, Junlong Wu, Fei Zuo, Huan Ouyang, Dewen Fan, Boheng Zhang, Huaiqing Wang, Jia Sun, Fan Yang, Houde Liu, Kehai Chen, Min Zhang, Tingting Gao, Han Li
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Beyond the Dirac Delta: Mitigating Diversity Collapse in Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Versatile Image Generation

arXiv:2601. 12401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for fine-tuning large-scale generative models, such as diffusion and flow models, to align with complex human preferences and user-specified tasks.

By Jinmei Liu, Haoru Li, Zhenhong Sun, Chaofeng Chen, Yatao Bian, Bo Wang, Daoyi Dong, Chunlin Chen, Zhi Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Finite Difference Flow Optimization for RL Post-Training of Text-to-Image Models

arXiv:2603. 12893v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard technique for post-training diffusion-based image synthesis models, as it enables learning from reward signals to explicitly improve desirable aspects such as image quality and prompt alignment.

By David McAllister, Miika Aittala, Tero Karras, Janne Hellsten, Angjoo Kanazawa, Timo Aila, Samuli Laine
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Step Back to Move Forward: Reflection-Aware Preference Optimization for Visual Generation

The paper introduces Reflection-Aware GRPO (RA‑GRPO), a reinforcement‑learning framework that aligns diffusion generative models with human preferences. It uses Diffusion Reflection to correct intermediate sampling paths by reversing the diffusion process, and Counterfactual Path Synthesis to embed these corrected trajectories into the policy, avoiding extra inference cost. Experiments on text‑to‑image and text‑to‑video models show RA‑GRPO outperforms existing methods, reducing reward hacking and improving generalization while remaining architecture‑agnostic.

By Junlong Wu, Jiuzhou Lin, Jia Sun, Boheng Zhang, Huaiqing Wang, Dewen Fan, Houde Liu, Qianqian Gan, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Drifting Preference Optimization for One-Step Generative Models

arXiv:2606. 02521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One-step text-to-image generators are attractive for deployment because they generate an image with a single forward pass, but preference finetuning them remains difficult: standard alignment methods often rely on policy likelihoods, denoising trajectories, differentiable reward gradients, or test-time optimization.

By Zhou Jiang, Yandong Wen, Zhen Liu