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Designing Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Models: A Unified Path-Space View

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TL;DR - This paper unifies reverse-trajectory and forward-matching reinforcement learning methods for diffusion models under one path-space policy-gradient framework. It argues that their empirical differences primarily arise from variance reduction and derives a recipe that improves prior diffusion-RL baselines.

  • Derives an explicit trajectory-space policy gradient using importance sampling between sampling SDEs.
  • Connects Flow-GRPO-style updates with the forward-matching structure of AWM and DiffusionNFT.
  • Organizes diffusion-RL design around value-gradient estimation, weighting functions, and sampling choices.
  • Proposes a rollout-reusing KDE value-gradient estimator and scale-bounded weights, validated on SD3.5-M and Qwen-Image.

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Designing Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Models: A Unified Path-Space View

arXiv cs.LG Yixian Xu, Yuanrui Zhang, Shengjie Luo, Liwei Wang, Di He 2026-08-14 arXiv:2608.14430
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 1 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 1 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-07 14:23:01.293205 UTC

TL;DR - This paper unifies reverse-trajectory and forward-matching reinforcement learning methods for diffusion models under one path-space policy-gradient framework. It argues that their empirical differences primarily arise from variance reduction and derives a recipe that improves prior diffusion-RL baselines.

  • Derives an explicit trajectory-space policy gradient using importance sampling between sampling SDEs.
  • Connects Flow-GRPO-style updates with the forward-matching structure of AWM and DiffusionNFT.
  • Organizes diffusion-RL design around value-gradient estimation, weighting functions, and sampling choices.
  • Proposes a rollout-reusing KDE value-gradient estimator and scale-bounded weights, validated on SD3.5-M and Qwen-Image.
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