arXiv:2602.04663cs.LGcs.AI2026-02被引 18

用最终生成样本估算似然,让强化学习更高效稳定。

Rethinking the Design Space of Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Models: On the Importance of Likelihood Estimation Beyond Loss Design

  • 仅用最终生成样本计算似然下界,提升优化效率
  • 在90小时GPU内将GenEval分数从0.24提至0.95
  • 适合追求高效稳定扩散模型训练的研究者

强化学习已广泛用于扩散模型和流模型的视觉任务,如文本到图像生成。然而,由于扩散模型的似然不可计算,直接应用主流策略梯度方法面临挑战。现有方法多聚焦于设计基于已有大语言模型目标的新目标,使用临时估计器估算似然,缺乏对估计方式如何影响整体性能的深入研究。本文系统分析了强化学习的设计空间,分离出三个关键因素:策略梯度目标、似然估计器与回溯采样方案。结果表明,采用仅基于最终生成样本计算的证据下界(ELBO)似然估计器,是实现有效、高效且稳定的强化学习优化的关键,其作用远超具体策略梯度损失形式的影响。我们在SD 3.5 Medium上多个奖励基准上验证了这一发现,所有任务均呈现一致趋势。该方法在90 GPU小时内将GenEval分数从0.24提升至0.95,相较FlowGRPO提升4.6倍效率,比SOTA方法DiffusionNFT快2倍,且无奖励劫持问题。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning has been widely applied to diffusion and flow models for visual tasks such as text-to-image generation. However, these tasks remain challenging because diffusion models have intractable likelihoods, which creates a barrier for directly applying popular policy-gradient type methods. Existing approaches primarily focus on crafting new objectives built on already heavily engineered LLM objectives, using ad hoc estimators for likelihood, without a thorough investigation into how such estimation affects overall algorithmic performance. In this work, we provide a systematic analysis of the RL design space by disentangling three factors: i) policy-gradient objectives, ii) likelihood estimators, and iii) rollout sampling schemes. We show that adopting an evidence lower bound (ELBO) based model likelihood estimator, computed only from the final generated sample, is the dominant factor enabling effective, efficient, and stable RL optimization, outweighing the impact of the specific policy-gradient loss functional. We validate our findings across multiple reward benchmarks using SD 3.5 Medium, and observe consistent trends across all tasks. Our method improves the GenEval score from 0.24 to 0.95 in 90 GPU hours, which is $4.6\times$ more efficient than FlowGRPO and $2\times$ more efficient than the SOTA method DiffusionNFT without reward hacking.

强化学习扩散模型似然估计高效训练

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