The paper introduces a data‑free learning objective called relative trajectory balance for training diffusion models to sample from a posterior defined by a diffusion prior and an arbitrary black‑box constraint or likelihood. It proves asymptotic correctness of this objective and demonstrates its use across vision, language, and multimodal tasks, including classifier guidance, language infilling, and text‑to‑image generation. Additionally, the method is applied to continuous control with a score‑based behavior prior, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results in offline reinforcement learning.
By Siddarth Venkatraman, Moksh Jain, Luca Scimeca, Minsu Kim, Marcin Sendera, Mohsin Hasan, Luke Rowe, Sarthak Mittal, Pablo Lemos, Emmanuel Bengio, Alexandre Adam, Jarrid Rector-Brooks, Yoshua Bengio, Glen Berseth, Esmeralda S. Whitammer
arXiv:2609.01493v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Black-Box Optimization (BBO) has found broad applications, but evolutionary algorithms and Bayesian optimization face efficiency challenges as real-w...
By Chao Qian, Chen-Guang Wang, Rong-Xi Tan, Ke Xue
arXiv:2606. 00366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of generating a large collection of initial guesses for local minima of multimodal non-convex continuous optimization problems.
By Anjian Li, Bartolomeo Stellato, Ryne Beeson
arXiv:2602. 08210v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heatmap-based solvers have emerged as a promising paradigm for Combinatorial Optimization (CO).
By Hyungseok Song, Deunsol Yoon, Kanghoon Lee, Han-Seul Jeong, Soonyoung Lee, Woohyung Lim
arXiv:2606. 15359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for planning and control by learning multimodal distributions over actions and trajectories.
By Paolo Giaretta, Zeyang Li, Navid Azizan
The paper investigates training diffusion models to sample from distributions defined by unnormalized densities or energy functions. It benchmarks various diffusion-structured inference techniques, including simulation-based variational methods and off-policy approaches such as continuous generative flow networks, highlighting their relative strengths and challenging some prior claims. Additionally, the authors introduce a new exploration strategy for off-policy methods that employs local search in the target space with a replay buffer, demonstrating improved sample quality across multiple target distributions.
By Marcin Sendera, Minsu Kim, Sarthak Mittal, Pablo Lemos, Luca Scimeca, Jarrid Rector-Brooks, Alexandre Adam, Yoshua Bengio, Esmeralda S. Whitammer