ViPO: Visual Preference Optimization at Scale

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission4207 Authors

Keywords: Diffusion Model, Image Generation, Video Generation, Visual Generation, DPO

TL;DR: Scaling preference optimization in visual generation through our proposed large-scale datasets and algorithmic improvements

Abstract:

While preference optimization is crucial for improving visual generative models, how to effectively scale this paradigm for visual generation remains largely unexplored.
Current open-source preference datasets typically contain substantial conflicting preference patterns, where winners excel in some dimensions but underperform in others. Naively optimizing on such noisy datasets fails to learn meaningful preferences, fundamentally hindering effective scaling. To enhance the robustness of preference algorithms against noise, we propose Poly-DPO, which extends the DPO objective with an additional polynomial term that dynamically adjusts model confidence during training based on dataset characteristics, enabling effective learning across diverse data distributions from noisy to trivially simple patterns.
Beyond biased patterns, existing datasets suffer from low resolution, limited prompt diversity, and imbalanced distributions. To facilitate large-scale visual preference optimization by tackling key data bottlenecks, we construct ViPO, a massive-scale preference dataset with 1M image pairs (1024px) across five categories and 300K video pairs (720p+) across three categories. Leveraging state-of-the-art generative models and diverse prompts ensures consistent, reliable preference signals with balanced distributions.
Remarkably, when applying Poly-DPO to our high-quality dataset, the optimal configuration converges to standard DPO. This convergence validates both our dataset quality and Poly-DPO's adaptive nature: sophisticated optimization becomes unnecessary with sufficient data quality, yet remains valuable for imperfect datasets.
We comprehensively validate our approach across various visual generation models. On noisy datasets like Pick-a-Pic V2, Poly-DPO achieves 6.87\% and 2.32\% gains over Diffusion-DPO on GenEval for SD1.5 and SDXL, respectively. For our high-quality VIPO dataset, models achieve performance far exceeding those trained on existing open-source preference datasets. These results confirm that addressing both algorithmic adaptability and data quality is essential for scaling visual preference optimization. All models and datasets will be released.

Primary Area: generative models

Submission Number: 4207