Reward-Instruct: A Reward-Centric Approach to Fast Photo-Realistic Image Generation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Luo, Yihong, Hu, Tianyang, Luo, Weijian, Kawaguchi, Kenji, Tang, Jing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909642191273984
author Luo, Yihong
Hu, Tianyang
Luo, Weijian
Kawaguchi, Kenji
Tang, Jing
author_facet Luo, Yihong
Hu, Tianyang
Luo, Weijian
Kawaguchi, Kenji
Tang, Jing
contents This paper addresses the challenge of achieving high-quality and fast image generation that aligns with complex human preferences. While recent advancements in diffusion models and distillation have enabled rapid generation, the effective integration of reward feedback for improved abilities like controllability and preference alignment remains a key open problem. Existing reward-guided post-training approaches targeting accelerated few-step generation often deem diffusion distillation losses indispensable. However, in this paper, we identify an interesting yet fundamental paradigm shift: as conditions become more specific, well-designed reward functions emerge as the primary driving force in training strong, few-step image generative models. Motivated by this insight, we introduce Reward-Instruct, a novel and surprisingly simple reward-centric approach for converting pre-trained base diffusion models into reward-enhanced few-step generators. Unlike existing methods, Reward-Instruct does not rely on expensive yet tricky diffusion distillation losses. Instead, it iteratively updates the few-step generator's parameters by directly sampling from a reward-tilted parameter distribution. Such a training approach entirely bypasses the need for expensive diffusion distillation losses, making it favorable to scale in high image resolutions. Despite its simplicity, Reward-Instruct yields surprisingly strong performance. Our extensive experiments on text-to-image generation have demonstrated that Reward-Instruct achieves state-of-the-art results in visual quality and quantitative metrics compared to distillation-reliant methods, while also exhibiting greater robustness to the choice of reward function.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_13070
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reward-Instruct: A Reward-Centric Approach to Fast Photo-Realistic Image Generation
Luo, Yihong
Hu, Tianyang
Luo, Weijian
Kawaguchi, Kenji
Tang, Jing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
This paper addresses the challenge of achieving high-quality and fast image generation that aligns with complex human preferences. While recent advancements in diffusion models and distillation have enabled rapid generation, the effective integration of reward feedback for improved abilities like controllability and preference alignment remains a key open problem. Existing reward-guided post-training approaches targeting accelerated few-step generation often deem diffusion distillation losses indispensable. However, in this paper, we identify an interesting yet fundamental paradigm shift: as conditions become more specific, well-designed reward functions emerge as the primary driving force in training strong, few-step image generative models. Motivated by this insight, we introduce Reward-Instruct, a novel and surprisingly simple reward-centric approach for converting pre-trained base diffusion models into reward-enhanced few-step generators. Unlike existing methods, Reward-Instruct does not rely on expensive yet tricky diffusion distillation losses. Instead, it iteratively updates the few-step generator's parameters by directly sampling from a reward-tilted parameter distribution. Such a training approach entirely bypasses the need for expensive diffusion distillation losses, making it favorable to scale in high image resolutions. Despite its simplicity, Reward-Instruct yields surprisingly strong performance. Our extensive experiments on text-to-image generation have demonstrated that Reward-Instruct achieves state-of-the-art results in visual quality and quantitative metrics compared to distillation-reliant methods, while also exhibiting greater robustness to the choice of reward function.
title Reward-Instruct: A Reward-Centric Approach to Fast Photo-Realistic Image Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13070