提出新方法提升扩散模型蒸馏在无分类器引导下的稳定性
Rethinking Classifier-Free Guidance in On-Policy Diffusion Distillation

- 设计分支感知的正向匹配机制,避免负分支误差放大
- 实验证明传统方法在高引导尺度下性能下降,新方法更鲁棒
- 适合视频控制、生成等需要稳定引导的应用场景
On-policy distillation(OPD)通过查询教师模型沿学生模型生成轨迹来适应扩散模型,但其在无分类器引导(CFG)下的行为尚不明确。现有方法将速度匹配扩展至组合预测,直接对齐教师与学生的引导速度。我们发现该目标在分支层面存在识别不足:正负分支误差可相互补偿。通过两种对比案例,我们发现当共享负条件时,朴素匹配仍有效;但若教师负分支包含学生无法获取的特权信息,则联合误差降低失效,组合目标引发对抗性分支误差动态,即正分支误差减小而负分支误差增大,此为负分支不对称(NBA)失败模式。为此,我们提出正向匹配(PDM),一种分支感知的OPD目标,分别约束正向预测与CFG条件方向。将PDM应用于密集到稀疏视频控制,发现朴素引导匹配对推理引导尺度高度敏感,而分支感知监督实现更鲁棒有效的知识迁移。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
On-policy distillation (OPD) adapts diffusion models by querying a teacher along trajectories generated by the current student, but how it should behave under classifier-free guidance (CFG), a default component of modern diffusion systems, remains poorly understood. Existing OPD methods naturally extend velocity matching to the CFG-composed prediction, directly matching teacher and student guided velocities. We show that this objective is under-identified at the branch level: positive- and negative-branch errors can compensate in the guided prediction. Through two contrasting cases, we find that naive matching remains effective under shared negative conditioning, where both branch errors decrease jointly. When the model's native CFG schema retains privileged information in the teacher's negative branch that is unavailable to the student, however, this joint reduction breaks down and the composed objective induces antagonistic branch-error dynamics, reducing the positive-branch error while increasing the negative-branch error. We term this failure mode Negative Branch Asymmetry (NBA). To address NBA, we introduce Positive--Direction Matching (PDM), a branch-aware OPD objective that separately constrains the positive prediction and the CFG conditional direction. We apply PDM to dense-to-sparse video control, where naive guided matching is highly sensitive to inference guidance scales, while branch-aware supervision enables more robust and effective knowledge transfer.
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