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Main Authors: Wang, Yifan, Li, Yanyu, Qian, Gordon Guocheng, Tulyakov, Sergey, Fu, Yun, Kag, Anil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04153
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author Wang, Yifan
Li, Yanyu
Qian, Gordon Guocheng
Tulyakov, Sergey
Fu, Yun
Kag, Anil
author_facet Wang, Yifan
Li, Yanyu
Qian, Gordon Guocheng
Tulyakov, Sergey
Fu, Yun
Kag, Anil
contents Video diffusion alignment has been heavily relied on scalar rewards. These rewards are typically derived from learned reward models in human preference datasets, requiring additional training and extensive collection. Moreover, scalar rewards provide coarse, global supervision, offering limited prompt-generation mismatch credit assignment and making models prone to reward exploitation and unstable optimization. We propose Diffusion-DRF, a free, rich, and differentiable reward framework for video diffusion fine-tuning. Diffusion-DRF employs a frozen, off-the-shelf Vision-Language Model (VLM) as the critic, eliminating the need for reward model training. Instead of relying on a single scalar reward, it decomposes each user prompt into multi-dimensional questions with freeform dense VQA explanation queries, yielding information-rich feedback. By direct differentiable optimization over this rich feedback, Diffusion-DRF achieves stable reward-based tuning without preference datasets collection. Diffusion-DRF achieves significant gains both quantitatively and qualitatively, outperforming state-of-the-art Flow-GRPO by 4.74% in overall performance on unseen VBench-2.0.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_04153
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diffusion-DRF: Free, Rich, and Differentiable Reward for Video Diffusion Fine-Tuning
Wang, Yifan
Li, Yanyu
Qian, Gordon Guocheng
Tulyakov, Sergey
Fu, Yun
Kag, Anil
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Video diffusion alignment has been heavily relied on scalar rewards. These rewards are typically derived from learned reward models in human preference datasets, requiring additional training and extensive collection. Moreover, scalar rewards provide coarse, global supervision, offering limited prompt-generation mismatch credit assignment and making models prone to reward exploitation and unstable optimization. We propose Diffusion-DRF, a free, rich, and differentiable reward framework for video diffusion fine-tuning. Diffusion-DRF employs a frozen, off-the-shelf Vision-Language Model (VLM) as the critic, eliminating the need for reward model training. Instead of relying on a single scalar reward, it decomposes each user prompt into multi-dimensional questions with freeform dense VQA explanation queries, yielding information-rich feedback. By direct differentiable optimization over this rich feedback, Diffusion-DRF achieves stable reward-based tuning without preference datasets collection. Diffusion-DRF achieves significant gains both quantitatively and qualitatively, outperforming state-of-the-art Flow-GRPO by 4.74% in overall performance on unseen VBench-2.0.
title Diffusion-DRF: Free, Rich, and Differentiable Reward for Video Diffusion Fine-Tuning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04153