Diffusion Guidance

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Overview

Diffusion guidance studies how to steer a pretrained denoising or flow model during sampling toward a condition or objective, enabling controllable generation and inverse-problem solutions without rebuilding the generator. Common approaches include classifier-free and contrastive score guidance, gradients from rewards, energies, or measurement residuals, and particle or optimization methods; applications range from text-to-image alignment and image restoration to robot motion, molecular design, and safe planning. Recent work also uses adaptive schedules, uncertainty- or geometry-aware corrections, and internal model features to reduce extra evaluations and handle nondifferentiable or spatially localized constraints. A central tension is balancing condition satisfaction against fidelity, diversity, and staying on the learned data manifold, while controlling sensitivity to guidance weights, approximate gradients, and sampling cost.

Latest papers

CardsList

114 papers19 papers in the last four weeks, up 138% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. ExecDiffuser: Closing the Sample-to-Execution Gap in Diffusion Planning

    Oct 27, 2026Shuo Pei, Bosun Liang, Saihui Zha +3Autonomous Driving PlanningDiffusion-Based Planning

    Shuo Pei, Saihui Zha, Huachun Tan are with the Beijing Institute of Technology, Guangdong, China. · Shuo Pei, Bosun Liang, Chen Sun, and Yong Wang (Corresponding author) are with the Department of Data and Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.

  2. VaLoP: Value Gradient Lookahead and Pullback for Reward-Guided Diffusion

    Oct 26, 2026Kwanyoung KimDiffusion Model GuidanceDiffusion Guidance

  3. EGGPlacer: Energy-Guided Generative Chip Placement with Diffusion Models

    Oct 22, 2026Qi Zhou, Guojun Liu, Juanhong Zhao +3Electronic Design AutomationMacro Placement

    Faculty of Computing, Harbin Institute of Technology

  4. VideoMaMa++: Temporally Consistent Video Matting via Preserve-and-Refine Token

    Oct 19, 2026Sangbeom Lim, Seoung Wug Oh, Heeji Yoon +2Temporal ConsistencyVideo Diffusion Models

    Korea University · Adobe Research · KAIST AI

  5. Reflection-Guided Dynamics Rectification for Text-to-Image Generation

    Oct 18, 2026Shuo Xu, Hanrui Ying, Debin Liu +2T2I GenerationT2I Diffusion Models

    Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Sorbonne University · Zhengzhou University

  6. Quantile-Guided Diffusion for Probabilistic Time-Series Forecasting

    Oct 14, 2026Shadi Omari, Bashar Khoury, Assaf SchusterProbabilistic Time Series ForecastingDiffusion Guidance

    Department of Computer Science, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

  7. MOSAIC: Mode- and Support-Aware Inference-Time Control of Robot Diffusion Models

    Oct 12, 2026Sabrina Bodmer, Rahel Rickenbach, René Zurbrügg +2Inference-Time GuidanceDiffusion Guidance

    Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zürich, Switzerland. · Automatic Control Laboratory, EPFL, Switzerland.

  8. CFG-Policy: Unified Diffusion Policy Learning Framework via Classifier-free Guidance

    Oct 10, 2026Shutong Ding, Zhaoyang Liu, Yimiao Zhou +3Diffusion PolicyRobotic RL

    ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China · InstAdapt, Shanghai, China

  9. BridgeGuard: Explicit Safety Drift for Diffusion-based Autonomous Driving

    Oct 8, 2026Zhenjun Qiu, Jianing Huang, Dongang Liu +6Safe Motion PlanningDiffusion-Based Planning

    Bosch Research · Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  10. Anatomy-preserving unpaired cone-beam CT refinement for image-guided radiotherapy using pseudo-label guided diffusion

    Oct 5, 2026Qi Lai, Yutong HeCone-Beam CTDiffusion Guidance

    Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, 518055,China. · Southern university of science and technology, Shenzhen, 518055,China.

  11. Best-of-NN Guidance for Test-time Diffusion Alignment

    Oct 4, 2026Richard Lee Kim, Yeongmin Kim, Gyuwon Sim +3Diffusion Model AlignmentDiffusion Model Guidance

    KAIST

  12. Getting Your Guidance Weights Right in diffusion and flow-matching posterior sampling

    Oct 2, 2026Liam Moroy, Jean-François Giovannelli, Yoann Altmann +3Diffusion Posterior SamplingDiffusion Guidance

    Heriot-Watt University, EPS Edinburgh, UK · IMS (Univ. Bordeaux, CNRS, BINP) Bordeaux, France · ONERA Paris, France

  13. ODDR: One-Step Deshadow Diffusion via Reward Guidance

    Oct 1, 2026Junseong Shin, Kijun Kim, Minseong Kim +2Synthetic-to-Real Domain AdaptationDiffusion Models for Image Restoration

    Department of Artificial Intelligence, Hanyang University · AX Future Technology Institute, KT · Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University

  14. Specificity-Aware Diffusion Steering via Variance-Reduced Sequential Monte Carlo

    Sep 30, 2026Luran Wang, Linrui Ma, Hannes Stärk +1Diffusion Model GuidanceDiffusion Guidance

    CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  15. FairDiff: Mitigating the Self-Reinforcing Matthew Effect in Diffusion Recommender Models

    Sep 29, 2026Song-Li Wu, Xianquan Wang, Zhaocheng Du +2Diffusion GuidanceAlgorithmic Fairness

    Tsinghua University · University of Science and Technology of China · Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab

  16. Trajectory-Level Mode Guidance for Controllable Diffusion-Based Multi-Robot Motion Planning

    Sep 29, 2026Tianyou Yu, Shengze Cai, Chao XuMulti-Robot Motion PlanningTrajectory Generation

    Institute of Cyber-System and Control, College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China

  17. Persistence Forcing: Exploiting Feature Specialization in Pixel-Space Diffusion

    Sep 28, 2026Chong Wang, Zixuan Fu, Shiqi Huang +3Diffusion TransformerDiffusion Guidance

    Nanyang Technological University · KTH Royal Institute of Technology · Hebei University of Technology

  18. RIDE: Reference-Anchored Inference-Time Diffusion Editing for Scaffold Hopping

    Sep 28, 2026Ruoxi Gao, Frazier N. Baker, Trieu Nguyen +1Diffusion GuidanceStructure-Based Drug Design

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University · Department of Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University · Translational Data Analytics Institute, The Ohio State University +1

  19. Domain-adaptive Zero-Shot Image Enhancement via Locality-Constrained Diffusion Guidance

    Sep 28, 2026Theresa Neubauer, Dimitrios Lenis, Astrid Berg +7Diffusion Model GuidanceImage Enhancement

    VRVis GmbH, Vienna, Austria

  20. Attention-Scoped Guidance: Training-Free Spatial Control for Image Editing

    Sep 28, 2026Zeyan Li, Wei Zhou, Hadi Amirpour +3Classifier-Free GuidanceText-Guided Image Editing

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Cardiff University · University of Klagenfurt +1

  21. ReGDiff: Guided Diffusion in Regulated Latent Space for Exploring Metamaterial Voxel Geometry

    Sep 28, 2026Wangzhi Zhan, Jianpeng Chen, Dongqi Fu +1Diffusion GuidanceMaterials Science

    Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA 24061 · Meta Menlo Park, CA 94025

  22. Flat-Consensus Diffusion for Robust Data Reshaping under Noisy Evaluator

    Sep 26, 2026Hongyu Cao, Kunpeng Liu, Fei Xie +1Automated Feature EngineeringDiffusion Guidance

    Clemson University Clemson, SC, USA · Portland State University Portland, OR, USA · University of Florida Gainesville, FL, USA

  23. ANaLOG: Anisotropic Native-Latent Operator Guidance for Solving Inverse Problems

    Sep 25, 2026Darshan Thaker, Lachlan Ewen MacDonald, René VidalDiffusion Model GuidanceDiffusion-Based Inverse Problems

    University of Pennsylvania

  24. Budgeted Quotient-Residual Guidance for Frozen Pocket-Conditioned Molecular Diffusion

    Sep 25, 2026Xinyu Wang, Jinbo Bi, Minghu SongDiffusion GuidanceMolecular Generation

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06269, USA · Institute of Health and Medicine, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center Hefei 230601, China

  25. PredActor: Predictive Action Diffusion for Steerable Onboard Humanoid Control

    Sep 21, 2026Lei Ye, Haibo Gao, Yitang Li +10Diffusion GuidanceHumanoid Robot Control

    Harbin Institute of Technology · Shanghai Innovation Institute · RoboParty Lab +2

  26. Geometry-Aware Diffusion Guidance via Curvature-Adaptive Tubular Correction

    Sep 18, 2026Enze Jiang, Jinwei He, Zheng MaDiffusion GuidanceDiffusion-Based Inverse Problems

    School of Mathematical Sciences Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai, China

  27. How to Guide Your Language Flow

    Sep 16, 2026Rohit Dilip, Tianrong Chen, Yuyang Wang +3Flow MatchingDiffusion Model Guidance

    Apple · Caltech

  28. ProtoGuide: Prototype-Driven Guidance for Class-Conditional Graph Generation

    Sep 14, 2026Salvatore Romano, Marco Grassia, Pietro Liò +1Graph GenerationDiffusion Guidance

    Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of Catania, Italy · Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, UK · University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome, Italy

  29. SwiftExplorer: Training-free Diffusion Model Alignment with Swift Diversity Exploration

    Sep 6, 2026Renye Yan, Jikang Cheng, You Wu +5Diffusion Model AlignmentDiffusion Model Guidance

    Peking University Beijing, China · Nanjing University Nanjing, China · Huazhong Agricultural University Wuhan, China +1

  30. Denoising as Projection: Constrained Optimization with Gradient-Guided Diffusion

    Aug 30, 2026Runyu Zhang, Jiawei Zhang, Gioele Zardini +2Riemannian OptimizationDiffusion Guidance

    MIT · University of Wisconsin–Madison