Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimization
Authors: name: Bram Wallace, name: Meihua Dang, name: Rafael Rafailov, name: Linqi Zhou, name: Aaron Lou, name: Senthil Purushwalkam, name: Stefano Ermon, name: Caiming Xiong, name: Shafiq Joty, name: Nikhil Naik

Large language models (LLMs) are fine-tuned using human comparison data with
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) methods to make them better
aligned with users' preferences. In contrast to LLMs, human preference learning
has not been widely explored in text-to-image diffusion models; the best
existing approach is to fine-tune a pretrained model using carefully curated
high quality images and captions to improve visual appeal and text alignment.
We propose Diffusion-DPO, a method to align diffusion models to human
preferences by directly optimizing on human comparison data. Diffusion-DPO is
adapted from the recently developed Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a
simpler alternative to RLHF which directly optimizes a policy that best
satisfies human preferences under a classification objective. We re-formulate
DPO to account for a diffusion model notion of likelihood, utilizing the
evidence lower bound to derive a differentiable objective. Using the Pick-a-Pic
dataset of 851K crowdsourced pairwise preferences, we fine-tune the base model
of the state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL)-1.0 model with
Diffusion-DPO. Our fine-tuned base model significantly outperforms both base
SDXL-1.0 and the larger SDXL-1.0 model consisting of an additional refinement
model in human evaluation, improving visual appeal and prompt alignment. We
also develop a variant that uses AI feedback and has comparable performance to
training on human preferences, opening the door for scaling of diffusion model
alignment methods.