针对扩散模型生成过程分阶段优化,提升偏好对齐效果与收敛速度。
Explore or Converge? Stage-Guided Per-Step Optimization for Diffusion Models

- 按噪声水平和语义变化划分生成阶段,分阶段设定优化目标。
- 生成质量提升26.7%,收敛速度加快36.7%。
- 适合需要高质量、稳定生成的图像/文本生成任务。
扩散模型具有强大的生成能力,但其最大似然训练仅关注数据分布重建,难以对齐特定偏好。基于强化学习的偏好对齐虽具潜力,却受限于奖励稀疏性。现有方法常将最终奖励回传至所有步骤,导致时间目标错配,引发奖励捷径与奖励滥用。同时,各步接收相同奖励,无法区分行为差异,削弱优化。为此,本文提出分阶段逐步优化(SGPO)方法,结合信噪比与语义变化识别生成阶段,自适应分配阶段特异性目标:早期混沌阶段侧重脱离混乱状态;中期结构稳定阶段在优化最终奖励的同时探索多样性,避免过早收敛;晚期结构固定阶段则优先稳定收敛,防止细节过拟合导致质量下降。16组对比实验验证,本方法在生成质量上平均提升26.7%,收敛速度提高36.7%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Diffusion models have strong generative capabilities. However, their maximum likelihood training objective only focuses on reconstructing the data distribution, making it difficult to align with specific preferences. Reinforcement learning (RL) for preference alignment in diffusion models is promising but limited by reward sparsity. Since a single reward cannot support optimization, existing RL methods usually backpropagate the final reward to all previous steps. However, denoising is stage-wise, with distinct semantics and controllability. Repeating the final reward across all steps creates a temporal objective mismatch, encouraging reward shortcuts that lead to reward hacking. At the same time, due to reward backfilling, each time step receives the same reward, making it impossible to distinguish between actions, thereby weakening the optimization process. To resolve this issue, we propose Stage-Guided Per-Step Optimization (SGPO) for diffusion models, which jointly leverages signal-to-noise ratio and semantic changes to identify generation stages and adaptively assign stage-specific objectives. Early denoising is chaotic and far from the final reward, resulting in weak reward-behavior correlation. This stage should prioritize exiting the chaotic state. In the mid stage, the latent transitions to a stable structure, where the final reward better corresponds to generative behavior. Therefore, this stage optimizes the final reward while exploring diversity to avoid early convergence to a single mode. In the late stage, the latent's core structure is largely fixed, and preference optimization mainly amplifies local details, risking overfitting. Therefore, stable convergence is preferred to avoid quality degradation. Results from 16 comparative experiments validate SGPO. Our method achieves 26.7% average gains in generative quality and 36.7% higher convergence speed.
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