On-Policy Self-Distillation in Diffusion Models
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The paper introduces DiffusionOPSD, an on‑policy self‑distillation framework that transforms image‑level reinforcement learning rewards into explicit targets for intermediate denoising predictions in diffusion models. By generating trajectories with a frozen behavior policy and constructing bounded positive and negative targets around query states, the method trains a policy to fit these targets before updating the behavior policy via an exponential moving average. Experiments on SD 3.5‑M and Z‑Image‑Turbo show that DiffusionOPSD achieves the best held‑out scores in 19 of 20 reward‑matched settings, outperforms the strongest competitor by up to 44 % and cuts GPU‑hour usage by 40–63 % compared to DiffusionNFT.
arXiv:2602. 07339v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based trajectory planners can model multi-modal driving behavior, but their iterative denoising process introduces a latency bottleneck for real-time closed-loop deployment.
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.
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: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...
Efficient text-to-image generation requires both reinforcement-learning (RL)-based reward alignment and few-step distillation, yet these procedures are typically performed sequentially, increasing training cost and risking the loss of reward gains during compression. We instead take an RL-native perspective: diffusion RL already generates reward-scored finite-step trajectories, whose intermediate states provide a natural source of distillation supervision rather than a disposable byproduct of sampling.