# Ranking-based Preference Optimization for Diffusion Models from Implicit User Feedback

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18353 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18353/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 35 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion and flow policies for robotics](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-and-flow-policies-for-robotics/)
- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Diffusion and multimodal model alignment](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/diffusion-and-multimodal-model-alignment/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10760/) (2022)
- [ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05977/) (2023)
- [Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13301/) (2023)
- [Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01569/) (2023)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12908/) (2023)
- [Advantage-Weighted Regression: Simple and Scalable Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00177/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17042/) (2023)
- [DPOK: Reinforcement Learning for Fine-tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16381/) (2023)
- [Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17400/) (2023)
- [Aligning Text-to-Image Models using Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12192/) (2023)
- [SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10629/) (2024)
- [Aligning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Reward Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03739/) (2023)
- [Using Human Feedback to Fine-tune Diffusion Models without Any Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13231/) (2023)
- [Iterative Reasoning Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19733/) (2024)
- [Aligning Language Models with Preferences through f-divergence Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08215/) (2023)
- [Aligning Diffusion Models by Optimizing Human Utility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04465/) (2024)
- [LiPO: Listwise Preference Optimization through Learning-to-Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01878/) (2024)
- [Self-Play Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Models for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10210/) (2024)
- [Aesthetic Post-Training Diffusion Models from Generic Preferences with Step-by-step Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04314/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [π-StepNFT: Wider Space Needs Finer Steps in Online RL for Flow-based VLAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02083/) (2026)
- [Data-Free Layer-Adaptive Merging via Fisher Information for Long-to-Short Reasoning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21705/) (2026)
- [When Preference Labels Fall Short: Aligning Diffusion Models from Real Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19839/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Direct preference optimization (DPO) methods have shown strong potential in aligning text-to-image diffusion models with human preferences by training on paired comparisons. These methods improve training stability by avoiding the REINFORCE algorithm but still struggle with challenges such as accurately estimating image probabilities due to the non-linear nature of the sigmoid function and the limited diversity of offline datasets. In this paper, we introduce Diffusion Denoising Ranking Optimization (Diffusion-DRO), a new preference learning framework grounded in inverse reinforcement learning. Diffusion-DRO removes the dependency on a reward model by casting preference learning as a ranking problem, thereby simplifying the training objective into a denoising formulation and overcoming the non-linear estimation issues found in prior methods. Moreover, Diffusion-DRO uniquely integrates offline expert demonstrations with online policy-generated negative samples, enabling it to effectively capture human preferences while addressing the limitations of offline data. Comprehensive experiments show that Diffusion-DRO delivers improved generation quality across a range of challenging and unseen prompts, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in both both quantitative metrics and user studies. Our source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/basiclab/DiffusionDRO.