Efficient Fr'echet Distributional Decoder Alignment for Latent Generative Models

Fr'echet Distributional (FD) objectives provide an effective distribution-level signal for post-training generative models. For latent generative models, however, existing FD-based post-training methods optimize only the latent generator while keeping the decoder frozen: the decoder is trained on reconstruction latents obtained from real images but deployed on generator-produced latents at generation time. When these latent distributions differ, this decoder train-generation mismatch means that the decoder is deployed on inputs drawn from a distribution it was not directly trained on. We introduce Fr'echet Distributional Decoder Alignment (FDDA), an efficient post-training method that freezes the latent generator and directly optimizes the decoder on generation-time latents using an FD objective. A single epoch of FDDA consistently improves gFID and gFDr6 across diverse flow-based and autoregressive latent generative models. Across all 11 evaluated models, FDDA reduces gFDr6 by 34.0-59.6% from the original pretrained models and provides a further 10.2-57.2% reduction after generator-side FD post-training. FDDA also reduces total wall-clock time by factors of 3.6×-328.7× relative to generator-side FD post-training across these models. These results show that generator-side post-training alone does not exhaust the benefits of FD optimization, and that further gains can be obtained by adapting the decoder at substantially lower cost.