提出SOAR方法,让扩散模型在生成时自动纠正偏差,提升图像质量与对齐度。
SOAR: Self-Correction for Optimal Alignment and Refinement in Diffusion Models

- 通过自纠正机制,在每一步去噪时引导模型回到真实目标状态。
- 在SD3.5-Medium上使GenEval从0.70提至0.78,OCR从0.64升至0.67。
- 无需奖励模型、无信用分配问题,可替代或衔接现有训练流程。
当前扩散模型的后训练流程分为两阶段:基于标注数据的监督微调(SFT)和基于奖励模型的强化学习(RL)。两者存在根本性断层:SFT仅在前向加噪过程采样的真实状态上优化去噪器;一旦推理偏离理想状态,后续去噪依赖分布外泛化而非学习修正,产生类似自回归模型的暴露偏差,但累积于去噪轨迹。尽管RL理论上可弥补此差距,但其终端奖励信号稀疏、信用分配困难,且易引发奖励劫持。本文提出SOAR(Self-Correction for Optimal Alignment and Refinement),一种填补该断层的偏差纠正后训练方法。从真实样本出发,SOAR执行一次停止梯度的滚动,将生成中偏离的状态重新加噪,并监督模型将其拉回原始干净目标。该方法为在线策略、免奖励,提供每步密集监督,无信用分配问题。在SD3.5-Medium上,相比SFT,SOAR使GenEval从0.70提升至0.78,OCR从0.64升至0.67,同时提高所有基于模型的偏好得分。在受控的奖励特定实验中,即使无奖励模型访问,SOAR在美学与图文对齐任务上的最终指标也优于Flow-GRPO。由于其基础损失包含标准SFT目标,可直接取代SFT作为预训练后的更强第一阶段,且完全兼容后续强化学习对齐。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The post-training pipeline for diffusion models currently has two stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated data and reinforcement learning (RL) with reward models. A fundamental gap separates them. SFT optimizes the denoiser only on ground-truth states sampled from the forward noising process; once inference deviates from these ideal states, subsequent denoising relies on out-of-distribution generalization rather than learned correction, exhibiting the same exposure bias that afflicts autoregressive models, but accumulated along the denoising trajectory instead of the token sequence. RL can in principle address this mismatch, yet its terminal reward signal is sparse, suffers from credit-assignment difficulty, and risks reward hacking. We propose SOAR (Self-Correction for Optimal Alignment and Refinement), a bias-correction post-training method that fills this gap. Starting from a real sample, SOAR performs a single stop-gradient rollout with the current model, re-noises the resulting off-trajectory state, and supervises the model to steer back toward the original clean target. The method is on-policy, reward-free, and provides dense per-timestep supervision with no credit-assignment problem. On SD3.5-Medium, SOAR improves GenEval from 0.70 to 0.78 and OCR from 0.64 to 0.67 over SFT, while simultaneously raising all model-based preference scores. In controlled reward-specific experiments, SOAR surpasses Flow-GRPO in final metric value on both aesthetic and text-image alignment tasks, despite having no access to a reward model. Since SOAR's base loss subsumes the standard SFT objective, it can directly replace SFT as a stronger first post-training stage after pretraining, while remaining fully compatible with subsequent RL alignment.
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