Human-Feedback Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Online Diffusion Model Finetuning

Controllable generation through Stable Diffusion (SD) fine-tuning aims to improve fidelity, safety, and alignment with human guidance. Existing reinforcement learning from human feedback methods usually rely on predefined heuristic reward functions or pretrained reward models built on large-scale datasets, limiting their applicability to scenarios where collecting such data is costly or difficult. To effectively and efficiently utilize human feedback, we develop a framework, HERO, which leverages online human feedback collected on the fly during model learning. Specifically, HERO features two key mechanisms: (1) Feedback-Aligned Representation Learning, an online training method that captures human feedback and provides informative learning signals for fine-tuning, and (2) Feedback-Guided Image Generation, which involves generating images from SD's refined initialization samples, enabling faster convergence towards the evaluator's intent. We demonstrate that HERO is 4x more efficient in online feedback for body part anomaly correction compared to the best existing method. Additionally, experiments show that HERO can effectively handle tasks like reasoning, counting, personalization, and reducing NSFW content with only 0.5K online feedback.

Changen2: Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Generative Change Foundation Model

Our understanding of the temporal dynamics of the Earth's surface has been advanced by deep vision models, which often require lots of labeled multi-temporal images for training. However, collecting, preprocessing, and annotating multi-temporal remote sensing images at scale is non-trivial since it is expensive and knowledge-intensive. In this paper, we present change data generators based on generative models, which are cheap and automatic, alleviating these data problems. Our main idea is to simulate a stochastic change process over time. We describe the stochastic change process as a probabilistic graphical model (GPCM), which factorizes the complex simulation problem into two more tractable sub-problems, i.e., change event simulation and semantic change synthesis. To solve these two problems, we present Changen2, a GPCM with a resolution-scalable diffusion transformer which can generate time series of images and their semantic and change labels from labeled or unlabeled single-temporal images. Changen2 is a generative change foundation model that can be trained at scale via self-supervision, and can produce change supervisory signals from unlabeled single-temporal images. Unlike existing foundation models, Changen2 synthesizes change data to train task-specific foundation models for change detection. The resulting model possesses inherent zero-shot change detection capabilities and excellent transferability. Experiments suggest Changen2 has superior spatiotemporal scalability, e.g., Changen2 model trained on 256$^2$ pixel single-temporal images can yield time series of any length and resolutions of 1,024$^2$ pixels. Changen2 pre-trained models exhibit superior zero-shot performance (narrowing the performance gap to 3% on LEVIR-CD and approximately 10% on both S2Looking and SECOND, compared to fully supervised counterparts) and transferability across multiple types of change tasks.

Mean-field Chaos Diffusion Models

In this paper, we introduce a new class of score-based generative models (SGMs) designed to handle high-cardinality data distributions by leveraging concepts from mean-field theory. We present mean-field chaos diffusion models (MF-CDMs), which address the curse of dimensionality inherent in high-cardinality data by utilizing the propagation of chaos property of interacting particles. By treating high-cardinality data as a large stochastic system of interacting particles, we develop a novel score-matching method for infinite-dimensional chaotic particle systems and propose an approximation scheme that employs a subdivision strategy for efficient training. Our theoretical and empirical results demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of MF-CDMs for managing large high-cardinality data structures, such as 3D point clouds.

SoundCTM: Uniting Score-based and Consistency Models for Text-to-Sound Generation

Sound content is an indispensable element for multimedia works such as video games, music, and films. Recent high-quality diffusion-based sound generation models can serve as valuable tools for the creators. However, despite producing high-quality sounds, these models often suffer from slow inference speeds. This drawback burdens creators, who typically refine their sounds through trial and error to align them with their artistic intentions. To address this issue, we introduce Sound Consistency Trajectory Models (SoundCTM). Our model enables flexible transitioning between high-quality 1-step sound generation and superior sound quality through multi-step generation. This allows creators to initially control sounds with 1-step samples before refining them through multi-step generation. While CTM fundamentally achieves flexible 1-step and multi-step generation, its impressive performance heavily depends on an additional pretrained feature extractor and an adversarial loss, which are expensive to train and not always available in other domains. Thus, we reframe CTM's training framework and introduce a novel feature distance by utilizing the teacher's network for a distillation loss. Additionally, while distilling classifier-free guided trajectories, we train conditional and unconditional student models simultaneously and interpolate between these models during inference. We also propose training-free controllable frameworks for SoundCTM, leveraging its flexible sampling capability. SoundCTM achieves both promising 1-step and multi-step real-time sound generation without using any extra off-the-shelf networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate SoundCTM's capability of controllable sound generation in a training-free manner.

PaGoDA: Progressive Growing of a One-Step Generator from a Low-Resolution Diffusion Teacher

To accelerate sampling, diffusion models (DMs) are often distilled into generators that directly map noise to data in a single step. In this approach, the resolution of the generator is fundamentally limited by that of the teacher DM. To overcome this limitation, we propose Progressive Growing of Diffusion Autoencoder (PaGoDA), a technique to progressively grow the resolution of the generator beyond that of the original teacher DM. Our key insight is that a pre-trained, low-resolution DM can be used to deterministically encode high-resolution data to a structured latent space by solving the PF-ODE forward in time (data-to-noise), starting from an appropriately down-sampled image. Using this frozen encoder in an auto-encoder framework, we train a decoder by progressively growing its resolution. From the nature of progressively growing decoder, PaGoDA avoids re-training teacher/student models when we upsample the student model, making the whole training pipeline much cheaper. In experiments, we used our progressively growing decoder to upsample from the pre-trained model's 64x64 resolution to generate 512x512 samples, achieving 2x faster inference compared to single-step distilled Stable Diffusion like LCM. PaGoDA also achieved state-of-the-art FIDs on ImageNet across all resolutions from 64x64 to 512x512. Additionally, we demonstrated PaGoDA's effectiveness in solving inverse problems and enabling controllable generation.

Training Unbiased Diffusion Models From Biased Dataset

With significant advancements in diffusion models, addressing the potential risks of dataset bias becomes increasingly important. Since generated outputs directly suffer from dataset bias, mitigating latent bias becomes a key factor in improving sample quality and proportion. This paper proposes time-dependent importance reweighting to mitigate the bias for the diffusion models. We demonstrate that the time-dependent density ratio becomes more precise than previous approaches, thereby minimizing error propagation in generative learning. While directly applying it to score-matching is intractable, we discover that using the time-dependent density ratio both for reweighting and score correction can lead to a tractable form of the objective function to regenerate the unbiased data density. Furthermore, we theoretically establish a connection with traditional score-matching, and we demonstrate its convergence to an unbiased distribution. The experimental evidence supports the usefulness of the proposed method, which outperforms baselines including time-independent importance reweighting on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, FFHQ, and CelebA with various bias settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/alsdudrla10/TIW-DSM.

Manifold Preserving Guided Diffusion

Despite the recent advancements, conditional image generation still faces challenges of cost, generalizability, and the need for task-specific training. In this paper, we propose Manifold Preserving Guided Diffusion (MPGD), a training-free conditional generation framework that leverages pretrained diffusion models and off-the-shelf neural networks with minimal additional inference cost for a broad range of tasks. Specifically, we leverage the manifold hypothesis to refine the guided diffusion steps and introduce a shortcut algorithm in the process. We then propose two methods for on-manifold training-free guidance using pre-trained autoencoders and demonstrate that our shortcut inherently preserves the manifolds when applied to latent diffusion models. Our experiments show that MPGD is efficient and effective for solving a variety of conditional generation applications in low-compute settings, and can consistently offer up to 3.8x speed-ups with the same number of diffusion steps while maintaining high sample quality compared to the baselines.

Consistency Trajectory Models: Learning Probability Flow ODE Trajectory of Diffusion

Consistency Models (CM) (Song et al., 2023) accelerate score-based diffusion model sampling at the cost of sample quality but lack a natural way to trade-off quality for speed. To address this limitation, we propose Consistency Trajectory Model (CTM), a generalization encompassing CM and score-based models as special cases. CTM trains a single neural network that can -- in a single forward pass -- output scores (i.e., gradients of log-density) and enables unrestricted traversal between any initial and final time along the Probability Flow Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) in a diffusion process. CTM enables the efficient combination of adversarial training and denoising score matching loss to enhance performance and achieves new state-of-the-art FIDs for single-step diffusion model sampling on CIFAR-10 (FID 1.73) and ImageNet at 64X64 resolution (FID 2.06). CTM also enables a new family of sampling schemes, both deterministic and stochastic, involving long jumps along the ODE solution trajectories. It consistently improves sample quality as computational budgets increase, avoiding the degradation seen in CM. Furthermore, CTM's access to the score accommodates all diffusion model inference techniques, including exact likelihood computation.

Refining Generative Process with Discriminator Guidance in Score-based Diffusion Models

While the success of diffusion models has been witnessed in various domains, only a few works have investigated the variation of the generative process. In this paper, we introduce a new generative process that is closer to the reverse process than the original generative process, given the identical score checkpoint. Specifically, we adjust the generative process with the auxiliary discriminator between the real data and the generated data. Consequently, the adjusted generative process with the discriminator generates more realistic samples than the original process. In experiments, we achieve new SOTA FIDs of 1.74 on CIFAR-10, 1.33 on CelebA, and 1.88 on FFHQ in the unconditional generation.

Maximum Likelihood Training of Implicit Nonlinear Diffusion Models

Whereas diverse variations of diffusion models exist, expanding the linear diffusion into a nonlinear diffusion process is investigated only by a few works. The nonlinearity effect has been hardly understood, but intuitively, there would be more promising diffusion patterns to optimally train the generative distribution towards the data distribution. This paper introduces such a data-adaptive and nonlinear diffusion process for score-based diffusion models. The proposed Implicit Nonlinear Diffusion Model (INDM) learns the nonlinear diffusion process by combining a normalizing flow and a diffusion process. Specifically, INDM implicitly constructs a nonlinear diffusion on the \textit{data space} by leveraging a linear diffusion on the \textit{latent space} through a flow network. This flow network is the key to forming a nonlinear diffusion as the nonlinearity fully depends on the flow network. This flexible nonlinearity is what improves the learning curve of INDM to nearly MLE training, compared against the non-MLE training of DDPM++, which turns out to be a special case of INDM with the identity flow. Also, training the nonlinear diffusion empirically yields a sampling-friendly latent diffusion that the sample trajectory of INDM is closer to an optimal transport than the trajectories of previous research. In experiments, INDM achieves the state-of-the-art FID on CelebA.