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Diffusion Tree Sampling: Scalable inference-time alignment of diffusion models

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arxiv 2506.20701 v1 pith:RN55OZIG submitted 2025-06-25 cs.LG cs.AIstat.ML

Diffusion Tree Sampling: Scalable inference-time alignment of diffusion models

classification cs.LG cs.AIstat.ML
keywords diffusionsamplescomputesearchtreealignmentgenerationhigh
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Adapting a pretrained diffusion model to new objectives at inference time remains an open problem in generative modeling. Existing steering methods suffer from inaccurate value estimation, especially at high noise levels, which biases guidance. Moreover, information from past runs is not reused to improve sample quality, resulting in inefficient use of compute. Inspired by the success of Monte Carlo Tree Search, we address these limitations by casting inference-time alignment as a search problem that reuses past computations. We introduce a tree-based approach that samples from the reward-aligned target density by propagating terminal rewards back through the diffusion chain and iteratively refining value estimates with each additional generation. Our proposed method, Diffusion Tree Sampling (DTS), produces asymptotically exact samples from the target distribution in the limit of infinite rollouts, and its greedy variant, Diffusion Tree Search (DTS$^\star$), performs a global search for high reward samples. On MNIST and CIFAR-10 class-conditional generation, DTS matches the FID of the best-performing baseline with up to $10\times$ less compute. In text-to-image generation and language completion tasks, DTS$^\star$ effectively searches for high reward samples that match best-of-N with up to $5\times$ less compute. By reusing information from previous generations, we get an anytime algorithm that turns additional compute into steadily better samples, providing a scalable approach for inference-time alignment of diffusion models.

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Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    Bootstrap Flow-Map Trees construct complete DDPM-like trajectories with a single NFE and dynamic steps, enabling efficient online feedback-driven search and alignment that beats prior tree and SMC samplers.

  2. Offline Preference Optimization for Rectified Flow with Noise-Tracked Pairs

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    PNAPO augments preference data with prior noise pairs and uses straight-line interpolation to create a tighter surrogate objective for offline alignment of rectified flow models.

  3. VASR: Variance-Aware Systematic Resampling for Reward-Guided Diffusion

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    FVD applies Fleming-Viot population dynamics to diffusion model sampling at inference time to reduce diversity collapse while improving reward alignment and FID scores.

  4. Sequentially-Controlled Interactive Multi-Particle Flow-Maps for Online Feedback-Driven Search

    cs.LG 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    IMPFM is a multi-particle flow-map sampling method with sequential posterior sharing and interaction-aware correction that targets a KL-tilted distribution for global exploration in online feedback search.

  5. Few-step Cofolding with All-Atom Flow Maps

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DeCAF distills all-atom cofolding diffusion models into few-step flow maps, showing improved or matched accuracy on protein-ligand tasks with 5x fewer inference steps.

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  7. VASR: Variance-Aware Systematic Resampling for Reward-Guided Diffusion

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  8. HardFlow: Hard-Constrained Sampling for Flow-Matching Models via Trajectory Optimization

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