统一了扩散模型强化学习的多种方法,揭示其本质是同一路径空间原理。
Designing Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Models: A Unified Path-Space View

- 基于路径空间原理推导出统一的策略梯度估计器。
- 实验验证新方法在多个模型上优于现有基线,提升稳定性与效果。
- 适合研究扩散模型对齐与强化学习融合的学者参考。
强化学习后训练为对齐扩散模型与人类偏好及任务奖励提供了直接途径。然而,当前针对扩散模型的强化学习算法仍呈碎片化:反向轨迹方法依赖离散化的似然比,而正向匹配方法则在带奖励标签的噪声样本上进行训练。本文表明,这些看似不同的损失函数实则源于单一路径空间原则。从正则化扩散-强化学习目标出发,通过采样SDE间的重要度采样,我们推导出轨迹空间上的显式策略梯度估计器。该估计器包含Flow-GRPO类更新背后的随机Itô积分;我们进一步推导出等价的方差缩减值梯度形式,恢复了AWM和DiffusionNFT的正向匹配结构。这揭示了两类方法间的实证差距本质上是方差缩减效应,而非强化学习原理差异。推导结果构建了一个由值梯度估计、权重函数和采样选择组织的统一设计空间。在此空间中,我们提出一种多样本KDE值梯度估计器,重用回滚组,并引入尺度有界的权重族,在保持现有稳定方法的同时排除奇异情况。在SD3.5-M和Qwen-Image模型上的实验验证了方差缩减解释,并表明所提方案优于先前扩散-强化学习基线。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training provides a direct way to align diffusion models with human preferences and task-specific rewards. However, current RL algorithms for diffusion models remain fragmented: reverse-trajectory methods rely on discretized likelihood ratios, whereas forward-matching methods train on reward-labeled noising versions of the rollout samples. This paper shows that these seemingly different losses arise from a single path-space principle. Starting from the regularized diffusion-RL objective, we use importance sampling between sampling SDEs to obtain an explicit policy-gradient estimator on trajectory space. The estimator contains the stochastic Itô integral underlying Flow-GRPO-type updates; we derive an equivalent variance-reduced value-gradient form that recovers the forward-matching structure of AWM and DiffusionNFT. This identifies the empirical gap between these method families as a variance-reduction effect rather than a difference in RL principle. The derivation yields a unified design space organized by value-gradient estimation, weight functions, and sampling choices. Within this space, we propose a multi-sample KDE value-gradient estimator that reuses rollout groups, together with scale-bounded weight families that retain stable existing recipes while excluding singular ones. Experiments on SD3.5-M and Qwen-Image models validate the variance-reduction explanation and show that the resulting recipe improves over prior diffusion-RL baselines.
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