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Sample-Adaptive Latent Rewards for Uncertainty-Guided Diffusion Post-Training

Research Multimodal & Generative

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TL;DR - SURE is a latent-space framework that makes diffusion post-training uncertainty-aware: its reward model predicts a Gaussian (mean + variance) instead of a scalar, and that variance is used to weight reward feedback so unreliable signals don't drive reward hacking. It matters because it improves alignment stability for image and video diffusion without pixel-space decoding.

  • SURE-LRM: a sample-adaptive latent reward model that outputs a Gaussian utility per noisy latent — mean as the reward score, variance as prediction uncertainty, learned without human uncertainty annotation.
  • SURE-REFL: uncertainty-guided reward feedback learning that queries the frozen LRM at selected denoising transitions, converts detached variance into per-sample reliability weights, and backpropagates each weighted reward only through its local transition.
  • Efficiency: the whole pipeline stays in latent space, avoiding pixel decoding and backprop through the full denoising graph.
  • Results as reported: better preference prediction than strong baselines, SOTA across several metrics with improved optimization stability, and top VBench quality/semantic/total scores among evaluated methods.

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Sample-Adaptive Latent Rewards for Uncertainty-Guided Diffusion Post-Training

arXiv cs.CV Rui Li, Yuanzhi Liang, Ke Hao, Ziqiao Weng, Haibin Huang, Chi Zhang, XueLong Li 2026-08-06 arXiv:2608.06125
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-30 14:23:25.872341 UTC

TL;DR - SURE is a latent-space framework that makes diffusion post-training uncertainty-aware: its reward model predicts a Gaussian (mean + variance) instead of a scalar, and that variance is used to weight reward feedback so unreliable signals don't drive reward hacking. It matters because it improves alignment stability for image and video diffusion without pixel-space decoding.

  • SURE-LRM: a sample-adaptive latent reward model that outputs a Gaussian utility per noisy latent — mean as the reward score, variance as prediction uncertainty, learned without human uncertainty annotation.
  • SURE-REFL: uncertainty-guided reward feedback learning that queries the frozen LRM at selected denoising transitions, converts detached variance into per-sample reliability weights, and backpropagates each weighted reward only through its local transition.
  • Efficiency: the whole pipeline stays in latent space, avoiding pixel decoding and backprop through the full denoising graph.
  • Results as reported: better preference prediction than strong baselines, SOTA across several metrics with improved optimization stability, and top VBench quality/semantic/total scores among evaluated methods.
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