CRAFT: Aligning Diffusion Models with Fine-Tuning Is Easier Than You Think

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Hauptverfasser: Sun, Zening, Xie, Zhengpeng, Bai, Lichen, Shao, Shitong, Yang, Shuo, Xie, Zeke
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Sun, Zening
Xie, Zhengpeng
Bai, Lichen
Shao, Shitong
Yang, Shuo
Xie, Zeke
author_facet Sun, Zening
Xie, Zhengpeng
Bai, Lichen
Shao, Shitong
Yang, Shuo
Xie, Zeke
contents Aligning Diffusion models has achieved remarkable breakthroughs in generating high-quality, human preference-aligned images. Existing techniques, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and DPO-style preference optimization, have become principled tools for fine-tuning diffusion models. However, SFT relies on high-quality images that are costly to obtain, while DPO-style methods depend on large-scale preference datasets, which are often inconsistent in quality. Beyond data dependency, these methods are further constrained by computational inefficiency. To address these two challenges, we propose Composite Reward Assisted Fine-Tuning (CRAFT), a lightweight yet powerful fine-tuning paradigm that requires significantly reduced training data while maintaining computational efficiency. It first leverages a Composite Reward Filtering (CRF) technique to construct a high-quality and consistent training dataset and then perform an enhanced variant of SFT. We also theoretically prove that CRAFT actually optimizes the lower bound of group-based reinforcement learning, establishing a principled connection between SFT with selected data and reinforcement learning. Our extensive empirical results demonstrate that CRAFT with only 100 samples can easily outperform recent SOTA preference optimization methods with thousands of preference-paired samples. Moreover, CRAFT can even achieve 11-220$\times$ faster convergences than the baseline preference optimization methods, highlighting its extremely high efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_18991
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CRAFT: Aligning Diffusion Models with Fine-Tuning Is Easier Than You Think
Sun, Zening
Xie, Zhengpeng
Bai, Lichen
Shao, Shitong
Yang, Shuo
Xie, Zeke
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Aligning Diffusion models has achieved remarkable breakthroughs in generating high-quality, human preference-aligned images. Existing techniques, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and DPO-style preference optimization, have become principled tools for fine-tuning diffusion models. However, SFT relies on high-quality images that are costly to obtain, while DPO-style methods depend on large-scale preference datasets, which are often inconsistent in quality. Beyond data dependency, these methods are further constrained by computational inefficiency. To address these two challenges, we propose Composite Reward Assisted Fine-Tuning (CRAFT), a lightweight yet powerful fine-tuning paradigm that requires significantly reduced training data while maintaining computational efficiency. It first leverages a Composite Reward Filtering (CRF) technique to construct a high-quality and consistent training dataset and then perform an enhanced variant of SFT. We also theoretically prove that CRAFT actually optimizes the lower bound of group-based reinforcement learning, establishing a principled connection between SFT with selected data and reinforcement learning. Our extensive empirical results demonstrate that CRAFT with only 100 samples can easily outperform recent SOTA preference optimization methods with thousands of preference-paired samples. Moreover, CRAFT can even achieve 11-220$\times$ faster convergences than the baseline preference optimization methods, highlighting its extremely high efficiency.
title CRAFT: Aligning Diffusion Models with Fine-Tuning Is Easier Than You Think
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18991