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arXiv Machine Learning By Austin Wang, Jiaqi Han, Stefano Ermon, Yisong Yue

Beyond Pairwise Preferences: Listwise Reward-Aware Alignment for Diffusion Models

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

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.

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