arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

On-Policy Self-Distillation in Diffusion Models

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.

By Wei Zhou, Xiongwei Zhu, Lingdong Kong, Bo Chen, Lei Zhang, Yongyuan Liang, Xiaoxia Hou, Ye Tian, Xian Sun, Yingshuo Wang, Linfeng Li, Shengqiong Wu, Leigang Qu, Feng Li, Wei Liu, Julian McAuley, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv AI
Aug 3

RAPiD: Reward-Guided Consistency Distillation of Diffusion Planners for Real-Time Autonomous Driving

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.

By Ruturaj Reddy, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Junn Yong Loo, Thanh Thi Nguyen, Ganesh Krishnasamy
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

Latent Reward Registers for Diffusion Preference Alignment

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 10

RL-Native Distillation: Exploiting Scored Trajectories for Few-Step Image Generation

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.