DiffusionNFT: Online Diffusion Reinforcement with Forward Process

<strong>ICLR 2026 (Oral)</strong>

     

Algorithm Overview

DiffusionNFT is a new online reinforcement learning paradigm for diffusion models that performs policy optimization directly on the forward diffusion process.

• Solver-Agnostic: Unlike GRPO, DiffusionNFT is compatible with any black-box sampler (e.g., high-order ODE solvers) throughout data collection.
• Theoretically Consistent & Memory Efficient: By operating on the forward process, DiffusionNFT maintains forward consistency and only requires clean images for training, instead of the entire sampling trajectories.
• Simple & Compatible: DiffusionNFT is built on the standard flow-matching objective, making it easy to integrate into existing diffusion training codebases.

The DiffusionNFT pipeline consists of: 1. Data Collection: The current sampling policy $v^\text{old}$ generates images, which are evaluated by a reward function. 2. Conceptual Data Split: Images are conceptually split into positive and negative subsets based on their rewards. 3. Forward Process Optimization: The training policy $v_\theta$ is optimized on noised versions of the collected images. Our novel loss function uses the rewards to weigh between implicit positive and negative objectives, directly integrating the reinforcement signal into the model's parameters.

Environment Setup

Our implementation is based on the Flow-GRPO codebase, with most environments aligned.

Clone this repository and install packages by:

git clone https://github.com/NVlabs/DiffusionNFT.git
cd DiffusionNFT

conda create -n DiffusionNFT python=3.10.16
pip install torch==2.6.0 torchvision==0.21.0 --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu126
pip install -e .

Reward Preparation

Our supported reward models include GenEval, OCR, PickScore, ClipScore, HPSv2.1, Aesthetic, ImageReward and UnifiedReward. We additionally support HPSv2.1 on top of FlowGRPO, and simplify GenEval from remote server to local.

Checkpoints Downloading

mkdir reward_ckpts
cd reward_ckpts
# Aesthetic
wget https://github.com/christophschuhmann/improved-aesthetic-predictor/raw/refs/heads/main/sac+logos+ava1-l14-linearMSE.pth
# GenEval
wget https://download.openmmlab.com/mmdetection/v2.0/mask2former/mask2former_swin-s-p4-w7-224_lsj_8x2_50e_coco/mask2former_swin-s-p4-w7-224_lsj_8x2_50e_coco_20220504_001756-743b7d99.pth
# ClipScore
wget https://huggingface.co/laion/CLIP-ViT-H-14-laion2B-s32B-b79K/resolve/main/open_clip_pytorch_model.bin
# HPSv2.1
wget https://huggingface.co/xswu/HPSv2/resolve/main/HPS_v2.1_compressed.pt
cd ..

Reward Environments

# GenEval
pip install -U openmim
mim install mmengine
git clone https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmcv.git
cd mmcv; git checkout 1.x
MMCV_WITH_OPS=1 FORCE_CUDA=1 pip install -e . -v
cd ..

git clone https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection.git
cd mmdetection; git checkout 2.x
pip install -e . -v
cd ..

pip install open-clip-torch clip-benchmark

# OCR
pip install paddlepaddle-gpu==2.6.2
pip install paddleocr==2.9.1
pip install python-Levenshtein

# HPSv2.1
pip install hpsv2x==1.2.0

# ImageReward
pip install image-reward
pip install git+https://github.com/openai/CLIP.git

For UnifiedReward, we deploy the reward service using sglang. To avoid conflicts, first create a new environment and install sglang with:

pip install "sglang[all]"

Then launch the service with:

python -m sglang.launch_server --model-path CodeGoat24/UnifiedReward-7b-v1.5 --api-key flowgrpo --port 17140 --chat-template chatml-llava --enable-p2p-check --mem-fraction-static 0.85

Memory usage can be reduced by lowering --mem-fraction-static, limiting --max-running-requests, and increasing --data-parallel-size or --tensor-parallel-size.

Training

Unlike FlowGRPO, we use torchrun instead of accelerate to distribute training. The default configuration file config/nft.py is set for 8 GPUs, and you can customize it as needed.

Single-node training example:

export WANDB_API_KEY=xxx
export WANDB_ENTITY=xxx

# GenEval
torchrun --nproc_per_node=8 scripts/train_nft_sd3.py --config config/nft.py:sd3_geneval

# Multi-reward
torchrun --nproc_per_node=8 scripts/train_nft_sd3.py --config config/nft.py:sd3_multi_reward

Evaluation

We provide an inference script for loading LoRA checkpoints and running evaluation.

# Hugging Face LoRA checkpoint, w/ CFG
torchrun --nproc_per_node=8 scripts/evaluation.py \
    --lora_hf_path "jieliu/SD3.5M-FlowGRPO-GenEval" \
    --model_type sd3 \
    --dataset geneval \
    --guidance_scale 4.5 \
    --mixed_precision fp16 \
    --save_images

# Local LoRA checkpoint, w/o CFG
torchrun --nproc_per_node=8 scripts/evaluation.py \
    --checkpoint_path "logs/nft/sd3/geneval/checkpoints/checkpoint-1018" \
    --model_type sd3 \
    --dataset geneval \
    --guidance_scale 1.0 \
    --mixed_precision fp16 \
    --save_images

The --dataset flag supports geneval, ocr, pickscore, and drawbench.

Third-party Usage and Research

We are pleased to see DiffusionNFT being extended to a variety of new settings and applications. We welcome and encourage readers to refer to the following works and their corresponding implementations.

Time	Research	Link
[02/2026]	Flow-Factory	https://github.com/X-GenGroup/Flow-Factory
[02/2026]	AEGPO: Adaptive Entropy-Guided Policy Optimization for Diffusion Models
[02/2026]	DreamHome-Pano: Design-Aware and Conflict-Free Panoramic Interior Generation
[01/2026]	Bridging Information Asymmetry: A Hierarchical Framework for Deterministic Blind Face Restoration
[12/2025]	HY-World 1.5: A Systematic Framework for Interactive World Modeling with Real-Time Latency and Geometric Consistency	https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HY-WorldPlay
[12/2025]	MotionEdit: Benchmarking and Learning Motion-Centric Image Editing	https://github.com/elainew728/motion-edit/
[11/2025]	MammothModa2: A Unified AR-Diffusion Framework for Multimodal Understanding and Generation	https://github.com/bytedance/mammothmoda
[10/2025]	Uniworld-V2: Reinforce Image Editing with Diffusion Negative-aware Finetuning and MLLM Implicit Feedback	https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/Edit-R1

Acknowledgement

We thank the Flow-GRPO project for providing the awesome open-source diffusion RL codebase.

Citation

@article{zheng2025diffusionnft,
  title={DiffusionNFT: Online Diffusion Reinforcement with Forward Process},
  author={Zheng, Kaiwen and Chen, Huayu and Ye, Haotian and Wang, Haoxiang and Zhang, Qinsheng and Jiang, Kai and Su, Hang and Ermon, Stefano and Zhu, Jun and Liu, Ming-Yu},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.16117},
  year={2025}
}