The paper introduces ZeNOVA, a gradient‑free method for aligning initial noise in generative models. It uses annealed soft‑value guidance, manifold‑constrained hyperspherical Langevin dynamics, and Metropolis‑Hastings jumps to address instability in black‑box reward settings. Experiments on image and video models show ZeNOVA outperforms existing zeroth‑order baselines by more stably optimizing noise toward higher rewards.
arXiv:2608.29647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To mitigate the time complexity of generative models, one-step generative models have recently emerged through direct mapping from noise to data in a s...
arXiv:2606. 02453v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the remarkable fidelity of generative models, they frequently suffer from mode collapse.
arXiv:2603. 14504v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optimizing the noise samples of diffusion and flow models is an increasingly popular approach to align these models to target rewards at inference time.
The paper introduces Contrastive Noise Alignment (CNA), a training-time method for generative flow models that dynamically aligns Gaussian noise with data samples using a cross-modal InfoNCE objective. By modeling noise as an interacting particle system and regularizing with angular entropy and radial norm penalties, CNA reduces arbitrary data-noise couplings and flow curvature. Empirical results show that CNA improves generation quality, lowering FID by over 50% for few-step pixel-space generation compared to standard rectified flow and outperforming optimal transport baselines by at least 24%.
arXiv:2601. 14430v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling generative models is computationally expensive.
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.
arXiv:2606. 18066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernel (NTRK), a reward-guided diffusion sampler that injects reward gradients through the noise term, leaving the pretrained reverse kernel unchanged and requiring only a single sample per step.
arXiv:2604. 27147v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In generative modeling, we often wish to produce samples that maximize a user-specified reward such as aesthetic quality or alignment with human preferences, a problem known as \textit{guidance}.
arXiv:2607. 09133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While large-scale text-to-image generative models have achieved unprecedented visual performance, their inherent reliance on multi-step iterative solvers incurs severe inference latency.
arXiv:2608.30194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have recently advanced text-to-video (T2V) generation, yet they still struggle with fine-grained compositional alignment, such as attr...
We study the challenging problem of novel view video synthesis from single images or monocular videos. Existing methods, which operate under the assumption that pre-trained video models lack native novel view synthesis capability and enforce view alignment via camera conditioning, task-specific fine-tuning, or stepwise hard denoising guidance, often suffer from artifacts and compromised global scene consistency.
arXiv:2607. 00691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Black-box optimization is a fundamental science and engineering tool that makes it possible to optimize objectives without gradient information.