mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

ReNFT: Repairing Mode Collapse in Reward Post-Training via Internal Probability-Mass Recalibration

arXiv 2609.00061 ↗First posted 30 Aug 2026cs.LG cs.AI cs.CVcited by 2

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Abstract (arXiv)

Reward post-training of diffusion generators inevitably concentrates probability mass on a few reward-favored modes, a mode collapse that erases within-prompt diversity. Existing methods for mitigating collapse rely on external signals or interfaces, augmenting the reward with perceptual objectives, adjusting reference regularization, or modifying the text encoder, but none repairs an adapter that has already collapsed while preserving the acquired reward. We observe that online post-training primarily reallocates probability mass over capabilities inherited from pretraining rather than learning new visual content. Collapse is therefore suppression, not deletion, and can be reversed from within the generator. We propose ReNFT, which repairs a high-reward, low-diversity adapter through internal probability-mass recalibration. Unconditional probes first prioritize "anti-hub" prompts where the prompt-independent bias is easiest to expose. Two policy-dominated mixed routes then generate matched counterfactual proposals from the same prompt and initial noise, one probing the frozen base direction for suppressed alternatives and the other exposing the post-trained unconditional tendency. Reward ranking with an adaptive flipping guard assigns pull and push roles, and a joint-and-paired NFT update realizes the repair. On PickScore and GenEval, ReNFT retains 98.9% and 99.0% of NFT's reward while improving DreamSim-Div by 58.8% and 55.0%, respectively, offering a complementary alternative to external interventions.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 24 of its 31 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Aug 2026.

Builds on

24 of 31 references.

References · 24

  1. 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,177
  2. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,181
  3. 2022LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelscited by 4,152
  4. 2023GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignmentcited by 972
  5. 2025Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RLcited by 661
  6. 2025Pref-GRPO: Pairwise Preference Reward-based GRPO for Stable Text-to-Image Reinforcement Learningcited by 92
  7. 2025Uniworld-V2: Reinforce Image Editing with Diffusion Negative-aware Finetuning and MLLM Implicit Feedbackcited by 79
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  9. 2026DiffusionOPD: A Unified Perspective of On-Policy Distillation in Diffusion Modelscited by 40
  10. 2025Taming Preference Mode Collapse via Directional Decoupling Alignment in Diffusion Reinforcement Learningcited by 18
  11. 2025DiverseGRPO: Mitigating Mode Collapse in Image Generation via Diversity-Aware GRPOcited by 17
  12. 2025Stage-wise Dynamics of Classifier-Free Guidance in Diffusion Modelscited by 16
12 more
  1. 2025The Image as Its Own Reward: Reinforcement Learning with Adversarial Reward for Image Generationcited by 12
  2. 2026Alleviating Sparse Rewards by Modeling Step-Wise and Long-Term Sampling Effects in Flow-Based GRPOcited by 9
  3. 2025FeRA: Frequency-Energy Constrained Routing for Effective Diffusion Adaptation Fine-Tuningcited by 7
  4. 2026SOAR: Self-Correction for Optimal Alignment and Refinement in Diffusion Modelscited by 6
  5. 2026Flow-DPPO: Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization for Flow Matching Modelscited by 6
  6. 2026Beyond the Dirac Delta: Mitigating Diversity Collapse in Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Versatile Image Generationcited by 5
  7. 2026Embedding-perturbed Exploration Preference Optimization for Flow Modelscited by 5
  8. 2026TMPO: Trajectory Matching Policy Optimization for Diverse and Efficient Diffusion Alignmentcited by 4
  9. 2026When Policy Entropy Constraint Fails: Preserving Diversity in Flow-based RLHF via Perceptual Entropycited by 3
  10. 2026Advances in GRPO for Generation Models: A Surveycited by 2
  11. 2026Stitched Value Model for Diffusion Alignmentcited by 2
  12. 2026Optimizing Visual Generative Models via Distribution-wise Rewardscited by 1

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