arXiv:2608. 03929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning diffusion models with human preferences usually relies on a sparse terminal reward evaluated on the final generated samples, presenting a severe temporal credit-assignment challenge across the multi-step denoising process.
By Yuanshen Guan, Zipeng Feng, Zhiwei Xiong, Peiqin Sun
Diffusion models have strong generative capabilities. However, their maximum likelihood training objective only focuses on reconstructing the data distribution, making it difficult to align with specific preferences.
arXiv:2607. 07693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for aligning generative models with human preferences.
By Eric Zhu, Abhinav Shrivastava, Soumik Mukhopadhyay
The paper introduces Diffusion LAIR, a listwise preference optimization technique that leverages continuous reward scores instead of binary pairwise comparisons to align text‑to‑image diffusion models. LAIR transforms reward scores into centered advantage weights and optimizes an advantage‑weighted regression objective on an implicit reward defined by denoising‑loss improvement over a reference model, with a quadratic penalty to regulate reward magnitude. Experiments demonstrate that Diffusion LAIR surpasses strong baseline methods on SD1.5 and SDXL across generation, compositional, and editing tasks.
By Austin Wang, Jiaqi Han, Stefano Ermon, Yisong Yue
arXiv:2608.23664v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reward fine-tuning is becoming an important tool for adapting diffusion models to human preferences and task-specific objectives, but existing method...
By Jaemoo Choi, Wei Guo, Yuchen Zhu, Arash Vahdat, Molei Tao, Julius Berner, Yongxin Chen
arXiv:2512.10237v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback has emerged as a standard for aligning diffusion models. However, we identify a fundamental limitation i...
By Jiho Jang, Jinyoung Kim, Kyungjune Baek, Nojun Kwak
arXiv:2606. 19162v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Score- and flow-matching models often rely on preference-based reinforcement learning for two purposes: aligning with subjective preferences and, surprisingly, recovering properties such as visual realism and coherent object structure that matching-based training is intended to learn from the data itself.
By Nicolas Beltran-Velez, Felix Friedrich, Zhang Xiaofeng, Reyhane Askari-Hemmat, Xiaochuang Han, Adriana Romero-Soriano, Michal Drozdzal
arXiv:2606. 17979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing RL post-training methods for text-to-image generation usually convert the final-image reward into a single scalar advantage and apply it with the same strength to the entire generative trajectory.
By Jinjie Shen, Wei Deng, Xian Hu, Daiguo Zhou, Jian Luan
arXiv:2512. 06343v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reward models are central to Large Language Model (LLM) alignment within the framework of RLHF.
By Tong Xie, Andrew Bai, Yuanhao Ban, Yunqi Hong, Haoyu Li, Cho-Jui Hsieh
The paper introduces GRAS, a method that improves training‑free reward alignment for discrete diffusion models by reducing variance in guided proposals and adapting the resampling temperature during search. It achieves this without adding denoiser cost, using Rao‑Blackwellized estimates for differentiable rewards and a leave‑one‑out baseline for non‑differentiable ones. Experiments on regulatory DNA and protein design show GRAS outperforms existing training‑free techniques and rivals reward‑fine‑tuned models.
By Kwanyoung Kim
ReCAST is a method for assigning credit to multiple rewards during diffusion model training by using a reward-by-timestep weight matrix that respects user-specified reward budgets while ensuring equal total weight per denoising step. It allocates weight based on each reward’s informativeness, measured by its Rényi discriminability gain at each step, allowing rewards to contribute more when they are most informative. Experiments on SD3.5‑Medium with two four‑reward settings show that ReCAST improves or matches training rewards, enhances held‑out judges, and is preferred by an independent LLM‑as‑a‑Judge, indicating generalizable benefits.
By Yihang Chen, Yuanhao Ban, Kuei-Chun Kao, Cho-Jui Hsieh
arXiv:2503. 00539v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has evolved to be one of the main methods for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs).
By Debmalya Mandal, Paulius Sasnauskas, Goran Radanovic