Direct Discriminative Optimization: Your Likelihood-Based Visual
  Generative Model is Secretly a GAN Discriminator
Authors: name: Kaiwen Zheng; name: Yongxin Chen; name: Huayu Chen; name: Guande He; name: Ming-Yu Liu; name: Jun Zhu; name: Qinsheng Zhang
Published: 2025-03-03 02:06:22

Abstract: While likelihood-based generative models, particularly diffusion and
autoregressive models, have achieved remarkable fidelity in visual generation,
the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) objective inherently suffers from a
mode-covering tendency that limits the generation quality under limited model
capacity. In this work, we propose Direct Discriminative Optimization (DDO) as
a unified framework that bridges likelihood-based generative training and the
GAN objective to bypass this fundamental constraint. Our key insight is to
parameterize a discriminator implicitly using the likelihood ratio between a
learnable target model and a fixed reference model, drawing parallels with the
philosophy of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Unlike GANs, this
parameterization eliminates the need for joint training of generator and
discriminator networks, allowing for direct, efficient, and effective
finetuning of a well-trained model to its full potential beyond the limits of
MLE. DDO can be performed iteratively in a self-play manner for progressive
model refinement, with each round requiring less than 1% of pretraining epochs.
Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DDO by significantly advancing
the previous SOTA diffusion model EDM, reducing FID scores from 1.79/1.58 to
new records of 1.30/0.97 on CIFAR-10/ImageNet-64 datasets, and by consistently
improving both guidance-free and CFG-enhanced FIDs of visual autoregressive
models on ImageNet 256times256.