Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: name: Kevin Black, name: Michael Janner, name: Yilun Du, name: Ilya Kostrikov, name: Sergey Levine

Diffusion models are a class of flexible generative models trained with an
approximation to the log-likelihood objective. However, most use cases of
diffusion models are not concerned with likelihoods, but instead with
downstream objectives such as human-perceived image quality or drug
effectiveness. In this paper, we investigate reinforcement learning methods for
directly optimizing diffusion models for such objectives. We describe how
posing denoising as a multi-step decision-making problem enables a class of
policy gradient algorithms, which we refer to as denoising diffusion policy
optimization (DDPO), that are more effective than alternative reward-weighted
likelihood approaches. Empirically, DDPO is able to adapt text-to-image
diffusion models to objectives that are difficult to express via prompting,
such as image compressibility, and those derived from human feedback, such as
aesthetic quality. Finally, we show that DDPO can improve prompt-image
alignment using feedback from a vision-language model without the need for
additional data collection or human annotation.