arXiv AI By Kwanyoung Kim

VaLoP: Value Gradient Lookahead and Pullback for Reward-Guided Diffusion

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VaLoP introduces a new method for reward-guided diffusion called Value Gradient Lookahead and Pullback, which evaluates the value function at a less noisy state and pulls its gradient back to the current state to reduce posterior covariance errors. The approach unifies two common gradient estimators and adds a correction term computed with a single vector-Jacobian product, while VaLoP‑Fast amortizes this correction with a lightweight head trained on a single reward. Experiments across multiple models, rewards, and datasets show that both variants consistently outperform existing value‑gradient guidance, and VaLoP‑Fast achieves the highest success rates on robot policy benchmarks such as LIBERO and RoboCasa.

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