Noise-Space Reward Alignment for Few-Step Generative Models

Abstract

Few-step generative models produce high-quality samples in one or a few evaluations. However, steering them toward desired properties remains difficult, especially when only black-box reward evaluations are available. While one could apply approaches developed for iterative diffusion and flow-based models, such as direct RL fine-tuning or test-time scaling, we find that neither transfers well to the few-step regime: direct fine-tuning suffers from severe reward over-optimization, and test-time scaling sacrifices the efficiency advantage of few-step generation. We propose Noise Policy Optimization (NPO), which explicitly targets the alignment problem for few-step generative models. The key idea is to learn an amortized flow policy over the initial noise space of the generator. The trained policy transports Gaussian noise to a reward-tilted noise distribution, whose pushforward distribution through the frozen generator is exactly the reward-tilted output distribution. By keeping the generator frozen, we can effectively utilize the knowledge encoded in the pretrained model, yielding a better reward-quality trade-off than direct fine-tuning. The amortized policy moves the search cost into training, so inference adds only a lightweight noise sampling step on top of the pretrained model. To improve sample efficiency during training, we use ELBO-based likelihood estimation that requires only sampled endpoints rather than simulated trajectories. Across image, language, and protein structure generation, NPO consistently achieves a better reward-quality trade-off than direct fine-tuning, and matches test-time search methods with 16 to 549 times lower inference cost.