Learn to Guide Your Diffusion Model

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission20348 Authors

Keywords: Diffusion models, Classifier-free Guidance, Conditional sampling, generative mode

TL;DR: Learn Classifier-Free guidance (CFG) weights as a function of time and conditioning to better approximate the target distribution

Abstract:

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a widely used technique for improving the perceptual quality of samples from conditional diffusion models. It operates by linearly combining conditional and unconditional score estimates using a *guidance weight* $\omega$. While a large, static weight can markedly improve visual results, this often comes at the cost of poorer distributional alignment.
In order to better approximate the target conditional distribution,
we instead learn *guidance weights* $\omega_{c,(s,t)}$, which are continuous functions of the conditioning $c$, the time $t$ from which we denoise, and the time $s$ towards which we denoise.
We achieve this by minimizing the distributional mismatch between noised samples from the true conditional distribution and samples from the guided diffusion process. We extend our framework to reward guided sampling, enabling the model to target distributions tilted by a reward function $R(x_0,c)$, defined on clean data and a conditioning $c$. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology on low-dimensional toy examples and high-dimensional image settings, where we observe improvements in Fréchet inception distance (FID) for image generation. In text-to-image applications, we observe that employing a reward function given by the CLIP score leads to guidance weights that improve image-prompt alignment.

Primary Area: generative models

Submission Number: 20348