An overview of diffusion models: Applications, guided generation, statistical rates and optimization

M Chen, S Mei, J Fan, M Wang - arxiv preprint arxiv:2404.07771, 2024 - arxiv.org
Diffusion models, a powerful and universal generative AI technology, have achieved
tremendous success in computer vision, audio, reinforcement learning, and computational …

Understanding reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning of diffusion models: A tutorial and review

M Uehara, Y Zhao, T Biancalani, S Levine - arxiv preprint arxiv …, 2024 - arxiv.org
This tutorial provides a comprehensive survey of methods for fine-tuning diffusion models to
optimize downstream reward functions. While diffusion models are widely known to provide …

Aligning target-aware molecule diffusion models with exact energy optimization

S Gu, M Xu, A Powers, W Nie… - Advances in …, 2025 - proceedings.neurips.cc
Generating ligand molecules for specific protein targets, known as structure-based drug
design, is a fundamental problem in therapeutics development and biological discovery …

Score-based Diffusion Models via Stochastic Differential Equations--a Technical Tutorial

W Tang, H Zhao - arxiv preprint arxiv:2402.07487, 2024 - arxiv.org
This is an expository article on the score-based diffusion models, with a particular focus on
the formulation via stochastic differential equations (SDE). After a gentle introduction, we …

Opportunities and challenges of diffusion models for generative AI

M Chen, S Mei, J Fan, M Wang - National Science Review, 2024 - academic.oup.com
Diffusion models, a powerful and universal generative artificial intelligence technology, have
achieved tremendous success and opened up new possibilities in diverse applications. In …

Adding conditional control to diffusion models with reinforcement learning

Y Zhao, M Uehara, G Scalia, S Kung… - arxiv preprint arxiv …, 2024 - arxiv.org
Diffusion models are powerful generative models that allow for precise control over the
characteristics of the generated samples. While these diffusion models trained on large …

Alignment of diffusion models: Fundamentals, challenges, and future

B Liu, S Shao, B Li, L Bai, Z Xu, H **ong, J Kwok… - arxiv preprint arxiv …, 2024 - arxiv.org
Diffusion models have emerged as the leading paradigm in generative modeling, excelling
in various applications. Despite their success, these models often misalign with human …

Tuning-free alignment of diffusion models with direct noise optimization

Z Tang, J Peng, J Tang, M Hong, F Wang… - ICML 2024 Workshop …, 2024 - openreview.net
In this work, we focus on the alignment problem of diffusion models with a continuous
reward function, which represents specific objectives for downstream tasks, such as …

Scores as Actions: a framework of fine-tuning diffusion models by continuous-time reinforcement learning

H Zhao, H Chen, J Zhang, DD Yao, W Tang - arxiv preprint arxiv …, 2024 - arxiv.org
Reinforcement Learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been shown a promising
direction for aligning generative models with human intent and has also been explored in …

[PDF][PDF] Reward-Guided Controlled Generation for Inference-Time Alignment in Diffusion Models: Tutorial and Review

M Uehara, Y Zhao, C Wang, X Li, A Regev… - arxiv preprint arxiv …, 2025 - ai-plans.com
This tutorial provides an in-depth guide on inference-time guidance and alignment methods
for optimizing downstream reward functions in diffusion models. While diffusion models are …