Aligning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Reward Backpropagation
Authors: name: Mihir Prabhudesai, name: Anirudh Goyal, name: Deepak Pathak, name: Katerina Fragkiadaki

Text-to-image diffusion models have recently emerged at the forefront of
image generation, powered by very large-scale unsupervised or weakly supervised
text-to-image training datasets. Due to their unsupervised training,
controlling their behavior in downstream tasks, such as maximizing
human-perceived image quality, image-text alignment, or ethical image
generation, is difficult. Recent works finetune diffusion models to downstream
reward functions using vanilla reinforcement learning, notorious for the high
variance of the gradient estimators. In this paper, we propose AlignProp, a
method that aligns diffusion models to downstream reward functions using
end-to-end backpropagation of the reward gradient through the denoising
process. While naive implementation of such backpropagation would require
prohibitive memory resources for storing the partial derivatives of modern
text-to-image models, AlignProp finetunes low-rank adapter weight modules and
uses gradient checkpointing, to render its memory usage viable. We test
AlignProp in finetuning diffusion models to various objectives, such as
image-text semantic alignment, aesthetics, compressibility and controllability
of the number of objects present, as well as their combinations. We show
AlignProp achieves higher rewards in fewer training steps than alternatives,
while being conceptually simpler, making it a straightforward choice for
optimizing diffusion models for differentiable reward functions of interest.
Code and Visualization results are available at https://align-prop.github.io/.