DDSPO: Enhancing Diffusion Models with Self-Supervised Preference Learning

Published:Dec 29, 2025 12:46
1 min read
ArXiv

Analysis

This paper introduces Direct Diffusion Score Preference Optimization (DDSPO), a novel method for improving diffusion models by aligning outputs with user intent and enhancing visual quality. The key innovation is the use of per-timestep supervision derived from contrasting outputs of a pretrained reference model conditioned on original and degraded prompts. This approach eliminates the need for costly human-labeled datasets and explicit reward modeling, making it more efficient and scalable than existing preference-based methods. The paper's significance lies in its potential to improve the performance of diffusion models with less supervision, leading to better text-to-image generation and other generative tasks.

Reference

DDSPO directly derives per-timestep supervision from winning and losing policies when such policies are available. In practice, we avoid reliance on labeled data by automatically generating preference signals using a pretrained reference model: we contrast its outputs when conditioned on original prompts versus semantically degraded variants.