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Improved techniques for fine-tuning flow models via adjoint matching: a deterministic control pipeline

2026 · arxiv_cs
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IMPROVED TECHNIQUES FOR FINE-TUNING FLOW MODELS VIA ADJOINT MATCHING: A DETERMINISTIC CONTROL PIPELINE

arXiv:2605.06583v1 [cs.AI] 7 May 2026

ZHENGYI GUO, JIAYUAN SHENG, DAVID D. YAO, AND WENPIN TANG

Abstract. We propose a deterministic adjoint matching framework that formulates human preference alignment for flow-based generative models as an optimal control problem over velocity fields. One can directly regress the control toward a value-gradient-induced target under the current policy, leading to a simple and stable training objective. Building on this perspective, we introduce a truncated adjoint scheme that focuses computation on the terminal portion of the trajectory, where reward-relevant signals concentrate, which yields substantial computational savings while preserving alignment quality. We further generalize the framework beyond standard KL-based regularization, allowing more flexible trade-offs between alignment strength and distributional preservation. Experiments on SiT-XL/2 and FLUX.2-Klein-4B demonstrate consistent gains across multiple alignment metrics, along with substantially improved diversity and mode preservation.

FLUX.2-Klein-4B

2nd ODE-AM-3 (Fine-tuning)

Figure 1. Prompts are “a sad muppet funeral in a rainy graveyard”; “a futuristic house on a floating island with waterfalls and moons”; “a monkey in a blue top hat painted in oil by Vincent van Gogh”. 1. Introduction Flow matching models [1, 21, 24] are a class of generative models that train neural networks to predict a velocity field. This velocity field, described by an ordinary differential equation Date: May 8, 2026. 1

2

(ODE), enables the transformation of simple probability distributions into complex data distributions along straighter, continuous-time trajectories. Due to their training and sampling efficiency, flow matching models have seen immense success in large-scale, high-fidelity image/video generation, powering state-of-the-art models such as Stable Diffusion v3 [9], Flux.2 [5] and WAN [38]. It is known that pretrained base models often fail to produce samples that align with human preferences for quality and prompt adherence [45]. This is observed even for state-of-the-art flow-based models such as Flux.2; see Figure 2. To align a base model with desired outputs without compromising its foundational strengths, reward-based post-training is necessary.

Figure 2. Prompts are “Two planes are placed next to each other.” and “Two planes sit together on the grass.” From left to right: (1) Base, (2) 4th ODE-AM-1, (3) 2nd ODE-AM-3, (4) DRaFT-1, and (5) ReFL-5 on FLUX.2-Klein-4B. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), a reward-based post-training technique, was first applied to fine-tune LLMs [27] and has since been extended to diffusion model post-training [4, 10]. It encompasses RL with zeroth-order reward such as DDPO [4], DPOK [11] and MixGRPO [20]; direct reward-feedback methods such as ReFL [47] and DRaFT [6]; and diffusion-DPO [42]. In another direction, stochastic control approaches were developed to fine-tune diffusion models [7, 37, 40]. Typically, the objective is to maximize reward(post-output) − βDKL (post-output, pre-output),

(1.1)

where post/pre-output is the post/pre-trained generation. One advantage of (1.1) is that it has a closed-form solution, which is an exponential tilting of the pre-output. The goal is to sample this exponential-tilted distribution by solving a stochastic control problem on the pretrained base model; see [39] for a review. Recently, a series of works [7, 14, 22] proposed to sample a target distribution via adjoint matching in the context of stochastic control. The idea is to align the control field with a target reward by solving an adjoint ODE backward in time, which has its root in Pontryagin’s maximum principle [29, 49]. However, there are several drawbacks: (1) the objective of sampling the exponential-tilted distribution seems to be restrictive for diffusion post-training; (2) solving the adjoint ODE can be computationally expensive, especially for large foundation models where accurate adjoint integration requires finer time discretization.

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The purpose of this paper is to improve upon adjoint matching techniques for flow models, enhancing both training flexibility and efficiency. The contributions of this paper are as follows: • Deterministic control pipeline: As mentioned, most leading-edge base models have shifted to flow-based architectures. It is more natural to work within a deterministic control framework that aligns with the base model’s inherently efficient sampling scheme, though flow matching models do support stochastic samplers [12, 34, 51]. Here, we formulate post-training as a deterministic control problem that learns a velocity perturbation on top of a pretrained base model.We point out that adjoint matching under this deterministic control setting does not generate exactly the exponential-tilted distribution (i.e., the solution to (1.1)), which requires a stochastic sampler with memoryless noise schedule [7]. Nevertheless, it bypasses extremely large noise in the initial sampling phase with memoryless noise schedule, leading to much faster convergence. • Beyond KL regularization: KL regularization constrains the fine-tuned model to remain close to the base model, mitigating reward hacking. In the stochastic control setting, it translates into a running cost equal to the squared norm of the control field. While most prior works [7, 11, 25, 54] adopted KL regularization in diffusion model alignment, recent studies [18, 37, 43] suggest that alternative regularizers may offer superior performance. Here, we propose a regularization term defined as an increasing function of the control norm. Particular examples include polynomial norms of the control field, which offer greater flexibility in finetuning flow-based models. • Adjoint matching with practical acceleration: We derive simple adjoint matching objectives under the deterministic control setting. However, solving the adjoint ODE is computationally expensive. Here, we introduce a truncated adjoint scheme that allocates computation to the most influential terminal steps, following the observations in [7, 19, 47]. This truncated variant enhances the scalability of adjoint matching for large models: it yields a substantial speedup from 345s to 32s per update on FLUX.2-Klein, and meanwhile, the image quality is significantly improved with respect to the base model generation. Theoretically, we illustrate with a few examples where the control norm becomes large toward the terminal steps, thus justifying the truncated scheme. • Empirical performance: We show that our approach achieves a stronger balance between various reward improvements and distributional preservation on two pretrained backbones SiT-XL/2 and FLUX.2-Klein. On top of improving reward-related metrics such as Aesthetic Score, HPSv2, ImageReward, and PickScore, it also maintains diversity and reduces mode collapse as reflected by LPIPS, MS-SSIM, Coverage, and Recall. Closely related to our paper is the work [25], where deterministic control was applied to fine-tune flow matching models. Different from our approach, they learn the value gradient by directly solving the corresponding partial differential equation. Related Works: Flow Matching [21] trains a neural network to match a continuous-time velocity field, and Rectified Flow [24] learns straight transport paths between noise and data, enabling efficient ODE-based sampling. Early large-scale image generation systems mostly relied on U-Net [32] backbones, particularly in latent diffusion models(LDMs) and the Stable Diffusion [31]. More recently, transformer-based architectures have replaced UNets in high-capacity generative models. Diffusion Transformers [28] introduced ViT [8]-style

4

backbones for diffusion models, while SiT [26] studied scalable interpolant transformers under both diffusion and flow-based formulations. Modern text-to-image systems such as Stable Diffusion 3 [9] and FLUX [5] further combine rectified-flow-style objectives with transformer architectures, showing the scalability of flow-based modeling. RLHF has recently been extended from LLMs to diffusion-based generative models. DDPO [4] and DPOK [11] cast the generation process as a stochastic policy and optimizes it via policy gradient methods. Continuous RL approach was developed in [53, 54] to fine-tune diffusion models by treating score matching as action. More recently, GRPO [20, 23, 48]-style methods extend group-relative preference optimization to diffusion models. Despite their flexibility, RL-based approaches often suffer from high variance in gradient estimation and require careful tuning of reward scaling and KL constraints. These challenges become more pronounced in large-scale text-to-image models, where long sampling trajectories amplify optimization instability. Optimal control provides a principled framework for steering dynamical systems toward desired objectives under trajectory-level costs. More recently, it has been used in generative modeling and sampling [3, 7, 13, 25, 37, 41, 50]. These approaches provide a more principled alternative to reinforcement learning and direct reward optimization, but often suffer from high computational cost due to the need for solving auxiliary equations. Organization of the paper: The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews flow models and formulates our fine-tuning problem. Section 3 derives our adaptive deterministic-control pipeline. Section 4 provides theoretical examples that justify its efficiency. Section 5 demonstrates the robust empirical performance of our method. Section 6 concludes.

2. Preliminaries of flow matching models Flow-based generative models. We present flow matching models, following [21, 24]. Let X0 ∼ p0 = N (0, I) and X1 ∼ pdata . Define the reference flow X̄t = βt X0 + αt X1 ,

t ∈ [0, 1],

(2.1)

where α0 = β1 = 0, α1 = β0 = 1, and αt′ , βt′ denote the time derivativesof αt , βt . Let pt be the ⋆ ′ ′ marginal probability distribution of X̄t . The velocity field h is vt (x) := E βt X0 + αt X1 iX̄t = x ,

which is learned by solving v base := arg minv Et,X0 ,X1 the flow-based sampler is the probability-flow ODE:

v(X̄t , t) − (βt′ X0 + αt′ X1 )

dXt = v base (Xt , t) dt.

2

. Then

(2.2)

When v base = v ⋆ , the solution to (2.2) has marginals Xt ∼ pt for all t ∈ [0, 1], and hence X1 ∼ pdata . The same marginal curve can also be generated by a family of stochastic dynamics:   σ 2 (t) ⋆ ∇ log pt (Xt ) dt + σ(t)dBt , (2.3) dXt = vt (Xt ) + 2 for any state-independent diffusion schedule σ(t) (see e.g., [36, Section 5]).

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Unified view of different parameterizations. Flow matching and diffusion models can be understood from a common marginal-preserving perspective. Denote   ′ αt αt′ ′ ηt := βt βt − βt . st (x) := ∇ log pt (x), κt := , αt αt By [17, Proposition 6.3.1], for the affine flow (2.1) with Gaussian initial noise, the velocity v ⋆ (x)−κ x and score are related by vt⋆ (x) = κt x + ηt st (x). Equivalently, when ηt ̸= 0, st (x) = t ηt t . So different model parameterizations can be converted into the same velocity representation, see Table 1 for details. As a result, the stochastic and deterministic flow fine-tuning can be unified by holding the same learned velocity vθ : dXtODE = vθ (XtODE , t) dt,    σ 2 (t) SDE SDE SDE SDE dXt = vθ (Xt , t) + dt + σ(t)dBt . vθ (Xt , t) − κt Xt 2ηt Parameterization

Predicted quantity

Conversion to velocity

Velocity field

vθ (x, t)

vθ (x, t)

Score

sθ (x, t) ≈ ∇ log pt (x)

vθ (x, t) = κt x + γt sθ (x, t)

Noise

ϵθ (x, t) ≈ E[X0 | Xt = x]

vθ (x, t) = κt x − (κt βt − βt′ ) ϵθ (x, t)

Clean data

xθ (x, t) ≈ E[X1 | Xt = x]

vθ (x, t) = βtt x − ( βtt αt − αt′ )xθ (x, t)

β′

β′

Table 1. Equivalent parameterizations under (2.1). 3. Fine-tune flow models with adjoint matching 3.1. Deterministic Optimal Control. Consider the control problem [2, 29, 35]: Z 1 f (∥u(Xt , t)∥) dt + g(X1 ), X0 = x, min L(u; Xu ) = u

(3.1)

0

subject to the deterministic control-affine dynamics Ẋt = v base (Xt , t) + u(Xt , t),

t ∈ [0, 1].

(3.2)

∈ Rd denotes the state of the system, u : Rd × [0, 1] → Rd is the control, v base is

Here Xt the pre-trained velocity field, f : R+ → R is a regularization on the control magnitude, and g : Rd → R is the terminal cost. Define the cost-to-go functional starting from state x at time t under control u: Z 1 J(u; x, t) := f (∥u(Xs , s)∥) ds + g(X1 ), where Xt = x. t

The corresponding value function is: V (x, t) := min J(u; x, t) = J(u⋆ ; x, t), u

(3.3)

where u⋆ (x, t) denotes the pointwise optimal control. Under regularity assumptions, the equality of V (x, t) and the optimal control at u = u⋆ is given by (See Appendix A.1&A.2): ∇u f (∥u∥)

u=u⋆

+ ∇x V (x, t) = 0.

(3.4)

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Motivation for general regularization: As mentioned in the introduction, the common choice is f (r) = 21 r2 , which corresponds to the KL-regularized control cost. However, this quadratic choice is not indispensable: more general control penalties f can be used in the the adjoint-matching target. 3.2. Adjoint Matching(AM). To compute the gradient of L(u; Xu ) in (3.1) with respect to control parameters, we rely on the adjoint method. As shown in [7, Appendix E.2], this continuous-adjoint gradient can be learned by a matching objective. Define Z 1  u f (∥u(Xs , s)∥) ds + g(X1 ) , a(t; X , u) := ∇Xt t

representing the sensitivity of the cost-to-go under current control u. We have a(t; Xu , u)∥Xt =x = ∇x J(u; x, t). It can be shown that the adjoint state satisfies the backward ODE: h   i d a(t; Xu , u) = − a⊤ ∇Xt v base (Xt , t) + u(Xt , t) + ∇Xt f (∥u(Xt , t)∥) , (3.5) dt with the terminal condition a(1; Xu , u) = ∇X1 g(X1 ). Note that at the optimum u(x, t) = u⋆ (x, t), a = ∇x V (x, t). Multiplying (3.4) by ∇Xt u(Xt , t), we have: a⊤ ∇Xt u(Xt , t) + ∇Xt f (∥u(Xt , t)∥) = 0. Substituting it into (3.5) yields a simplified “lean” adjoint: h i d ã(t; Xu , u) = − ã(t; Xu , u)⊤ ∇Xt v base (Xt , t) , ã(1; Xu , u) = ∇X1 g(X1 ). dt

(3.6)

Motivation for truncated time-steps: Theoretical and empirical analysis (Section 4 and Appendix C) on the backward ODE (3.6) shows that the last few denoising steps are the most important. The parameter τ ∈ [0, 1) allows us to start control from an intermediate denoising time. Since the dynamics are deterministic, the distribution of X1 is induced solely by the distribution Xτ and the chosen control u. Observe that Equation (3.4) is a fixed-point problem. As long as f is differentiable and invertible, we can solve for u⋆ (x, t) as a function of the (optimal) lean adjoint ã(x, t) from this equation. This provides a surrogate target to train our control iteratively. Theorem 3.1. For the deterministic controlled problem (3.1) on the time horizon [τ , 1] subject to (3.2), if f : R+ → R is continuously differentible, strictly convex and increasing, then there is an optimal control u⋆ given by u⋆t = −

(f ′ )−1 (∥at ∥) at , ∥at ∥

t ∈ [τ , 1].

(3.7)

1 p Example: Typically, we can choose polynomial regularization f (x) = pλ x . Then the 1

2−p

optimal control is u⋆t = −λ p−1 ∥at ∥ p−1 at . Now we propose our Deterministic Adjoint Matching (AM) objective: Z 1 1 2 LAdj-Match (u; X) := u(Xt , t) − u⋆ (ã(t, Xt )) dt, 2 τ

7 ODE Sampling 1.0

0.8

0.8

0.6

0.6

0.4

0.4

0.2

0.2

0.0 1

2 3

5

10 15 20

Truncation Steps (nc)

HPSv2

50 0.0 1

ImageReward

HPSv2 Normalized improvement over base

Normalized improvement over base

SDE Sampling 1.0

2 3

5

10 15 20

Truncation Steps (nc)

CLIPScore

50

PickScore

(a) Normalized reward improvement for Truncated AM. ntruncate = 10, 12, 15 achieves best performances.

ImageReward

1.00

1.00

0.95

0.95

0.90

0.90

0.85

0.85

0.80

0.80 11

13

15

17

log10 (Reward Scale)

19

ODE-AM-4

11

13

15

17

log10 (Reward Scale)

19

ODE-AM-6

(b) Normalized reward improvement for HPSv2 (left) and ImageReward (right) under ODEAM-4 and -6 at ntruncate = 10.

Figure 3. Ablations on SiT-XL/2: (a) truncation horizon and (b) reward scale across higher-order ODE adjoint matching variants. See Table 6 and Table 5 in Appendix D for full results where ãt satisfies ODE (3.6) and the stochastic process X ∼ pū with ū = stopgrad(u). See Algorithm 1 for the empirical implementation pipelines of our adaptive methods, where our adaptions are marked in red as well. Stochastic adjoint matching algorithm can also be leveraged in our finetuning tasks, see Appendix B for detailed explanations on stochastic AM and corresponding algorithm. 4. Theory and Algorithms of deterministic adjoint matching Section 3 introduced two additional components of deterministic adjoint matching: a truncated time horizon τ and a general control regularizer f (·). Empirically, control intensity is highly non-uniform: [19] showed that successful first-order methods assign more weight to high-SNR steps. Two toy models with Variance Exploding and Variance Preserving dynamics also show the same trend (Figure 6 in Appendix C). Moreover, integrating the full-trajectory adjoint ODE is expensive for large models and prone to error accumulation. Quadratic regularization overemphasizes steps with maximal adjoints. Higher-order regularization mitigates this issue (see Appendix D.1). Here we give some simple calculations motivating why combining time truncation with higher-order regularization can significantly reduce computational cost while improving performance. Proofs are deferred to Appendix C. 4.1. Time Horizon. Consider the following elementary setting: X0 ⊥ X1 and the rectified flow Xt = (1 − t)X0 + tX1 , t ∈ [0, 1]. Let vt (x) := E[X1 − X0 | Xt = x] be the corresponding velocity. We analyze the controlled dynamics Ẋtu = vt (Xtu )+ut with terminal adjoint a(1) ̸= 0 and optimal control u⋆t given by Theorem 3.1. Proposition 4.1 shows that, when σ > 1, the control maximizer lies in the later stage of the denoising trajectory. Proposition 4.1 (Unique later-stage control maximum). Suppose X0 ∼ N (µ, σ 2 ) and X1 ∼ σ2 N (0, 1) are independent, the control intensity takes a unique maximum at t⋆ = 1+σ 2. Relative intensity is independent of the specific fine-tuned target. Also, the reward scale λ changes only the absolute, rather than relative, control intensity.

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4.2. Regularization. Proposition 4.2 below shows that higher-order polynomial regularization preserves the same peak location but smooths the normalized control curve (see Figure 7 in Appendix C). Therefore, a broader later-stage region remains close to the maximal control strength, which helps truncated adjoint matching retain neighboring reward-relevant signals. This toy example aligns with our empirical observations in Appendix D.1. Proposition 4.2 (Relative Control strength). Under the same setup as Proposition 4.1, for p-th order polynomial regularization, the normalized relative control strength is given by 1/(2p−2)  σ2 ∥u⋆t ∥ = . Rp (t) := maxs∈[0,1] ∥u⋆s ∥ ((1 − t)2 σ 2 + t2 )(1 + σ 2 ) Algorithm 1 Deterministic Adjoint Matching with polynomial regularization Require: Pretrained velocity field v base , parametrized velocity field vθ , reward model r, exponent p > 1, cost weight λ > 0, step size h, number of control steps T , number of finetune iterations N , batch size m. 1: Initialize vθ ← v base . 2: for n = 0, . . . , N − 1 do 3: Generate m trajectories using current model at t = 0, . . . , 1 − h: Xt+h = Xt + hvθ (Xt , t), 4:

X0 ∼ N (0, I).

Integrate the lean adjoint backwards in t = 1, 1 − h, . . . , 1 − (T − 1)h: base ãt−h = ãt + hã⊤ (Xt , t) t ∇Xt v

ã1 = −∇X1 r(X1 ).

Note that both Xt and ãt should be computed without gradients, i.e. Stop gradients: Xt = stopgrad(Xt ), ãt = stopgrad(ãt ). 5: Compute target-matching loss for each trajectory: 1 L(θ) = mT

X



vθ (Xt , t) − v

base

 2   1 (2−p)/(p−1) p−1 ãt . (xt , t) − − λ ∥ãt ∥

t∈{1,...,1−T h}

6: Compute the gradient ∇θ L and update θ. 7: end for

5. Numerical Results In this section, we test our algorithms against two flow matching baselines: SiT-XL/2 (675M Params., [26]) and FLUX.2-Klein (4B Params., [5]). For both models, we finetune with HPSv2 reward [46]. For evaluation, we also use other preference and alignment metrics: ImageReward [47], Aesthetic Score [33], CLIPScore [30], and PickScore [16]. We present our method by “Regularization order” + “ODE/SDE” + “AM” + ”Truncate steps”. For example, 4th ODE-AM-3 means deterministic (ODE) adjoint matching with 4th order polynomial regularization and truncate adjoint ODE to the last 3 steps. 5.1. SiT-XL/2 on ImageNet. SiT achieves strong ImageNet generation quality with small parameter sizes, ideal for detailed ablation studies. To evaluate this class-conditional model, we convert each of the 1000 ImageNet classes into a descriptive class prompt and generate

9 ntruncate

Regularization

HPSv2 ↑

ImageReward ↑

CLIPScore ↑

PickScore ↑

Iter. Time (s) ↓

Base Model DRaFT-1 ReFL-10

– – –

– – –

0.183±0.038 0.296±0.041 0.297±0.034

−0.658±0.915 0.266±0.909 0.282±0.885

0.239±0.049 0.260±0.041 0.265±0.038

0.190±0.011 0.200±0.011 0.200±0.011

− 26.7 26.4

SDE-AM SDE-AM SDE-AM

10 12 50(Full)

2nd 2nd 2nd

0.319±0.038 0.318±0.038 0.279±0.038

0.491±0.876 0.522±0.867 −0.084±0.989

0.271±0.038 0.273±0.038 0.244±0.052

0.206±0.011 0.206±0.011 0.197±0.012

47.6 49.6 83.8

ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM

10 10 10 12 15 50(Full)

2nd 4th 6th 2nd 2nd 2nd

0.316±0.040 0.328±0.038 0.329±0.039 0.321±0.039 0.324±0.039 0.290±0.037

0.450±0.903 0.574±0.834 0.535±0.862 0.477±0.860 0.522±0.877 0.185±0.967

0.266±0.040 0.269±0.040 0.269±0.039 0.266±0.039 0.267±0.040 0.243±0.049

0.204±0.011 0.206±0.011 0.207±0.011 0.205±0.011 0.206±0.011 0.199±0.012

47.3 47.3 47.7 49.3 52.0 83.8

Method

Table 2. Comparison on reward metrics with SiT-XL/2. Best values are shown in bold, second-best are underlined.

Figure 4. Above: SiT-XL/2 base model. Below: SiT-XL/2 with 6th ODE-AM-10 finetune for 150 steps. ImageNet classes, from left to right Shetland sheepdog, tiger cat, esser panda (red panda), castle, forklift and computer keyboard. images conditioned on the corresponding class labels. We investigate the effects of trajectory stochasticity, truncate steps and regularization mode with four reward/alignment metrics, see Table 2. The results show our pipelines improve over the base SiT model across all four fidelity metrics, while 10-step truncation with 6th order regularization achieves the overall best performance. See Figure 3 for ablations and Figure 4 for generated images. SDE-AM-Full and ODE-AM-Full already improve over the base SiT model, but they are less efficient, as discussed in Section 4.1. In particular, truncated AM consistently improves the four reward metrics while reducing the per-iteration wall-clock time from 83.8s for ODEAM-Full to 39 ∼ 57s. Detailed ablation studies are provided in Appendix D.3. 5.2. FLUX.2-Klein-4B Text to Image. We fine-tune FLUX.2-Klein-4B with 20 sampling steps and 500 iterations, using prompt set from the dataset HPDv2 in HPSv2. For evaluation, other than the fidelity scores, we also report within-prompt diversity metrics LPIPS [52], 1-MS-SSIM [44], and distribution-preservation metrics Recall and Recovery. Detailed evaluation protocols are deferred to Appendix D.4.

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From Table 3, our truncated AM variants (even with 1 step) improve the HPSv2 reward dramatically compared to the base model. While the baselines DRaFT and ReFL achieve slightly stronger gains on some fidelity metrics, our methods preserve much better withinprompt diversity and the base-model distribution, as shown in Table 4. In addition, with qualitative examples provided in Figure 5, we see clearly that truncated AM is less prone to reward hacking and mode collapse.

Figure 5. Prompts are “A portrait of a cat wearing a samurai helmet.” and “A snowy lake in Sweden captured in a vibrant, cinematic style with intense detail and raytracing technology showcased on Artstation.” Left to right: (1) Base, (2) 2nd ODE-AM-1, (3) 2nd ODE-AM-3, (4) DRaFT-1, and (5) ReFL-5. To put it more clearly, some methods such as 6th ODE-AM-1 and ReFL-5, appear to score higher on training reward HPSv2. However, when it comes to image diversity, methods such as 2nd ODE-AM-3, 2nd ODE-AM-1 and 6th ODE-AM-3 outperforms, as they have high LPIPS and 1-MS-SSIM. Overall, our approach is better at preserving diversity, which is consistent with the observation in [25] that methods based on direct differentiation tend not to align with the target distribution, but only favor some modes of it. To examine whether fine-tuning leads to mode collapse, we also compute Recall and Coverage to measure how much the fine-tuned distribution deviates from the original base distribution. We observe that 2nd ODE-AM-1 and 6th ODE-AM-3 preserve the distribution significantly better than others. One reason is that high-reward training methods such as DRaFT and ReFL tend to produce overly bright or visually flashy images, often at the cost of semantic alignment. Through various level of truncated steps and order of regularization, our methods managed to balance the tradeoff between achieving high image fidelity and preventing reward hacking. Finally, we observe significant acceleration with truncated Adjoint Matching compared to full adjoint matching during training: wall-clock time decreased from 345s/iter. in ODE-AM-Full to 32s/iter. in ODE-AM-1. For detailed analysis, see Appendix D.3. 6. Conclusion and Future Directions We introduced a deterministic AM pipeline for fine-tuning flow models, combining general control regularization with truncated adjoint computation. The method improves reward alignment while preserving diversity and substantially reducing training cost. In the future, we will extend deterministic adjoint matching to video generation or discrete diffusion models. In addition, our adaptive regularization is currently developed only for the

11 ntruncate

Regularization

Aesthetic ↑

HPSv2 ↑

ImageReward ↑

PickScore ↑

Iter. Time (s) ↓

Base Model DRaFT-1 ReFL-5

– – –

– – –

5.549±0.665 6.440±0.385 6.336±0.356

0.290±0.039 0.458±0.045 0.466±0.046

1.074±0.645 1.556±0.455 1.473±0.521

0.221±0.014 0.235±0.017 0.234±0.018

– 24.7 24.1

ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM

1 1 1 3 3 3 20(Full)

2nd 4th 6th 2nd 4th 6th 2nd

6.297±0.544 6.307±0.427 6.204±0.400 6.297±0.550 6.313±0.440 6.309±0.530 6.437±0.520

0.413±0.047 0.449±0.043 0.470±0.046 0.422±0.047 0.449±0.043 0.422±0.043 0.382±0.044

1.470±0.503 1.522±0.503 1.531±0.514 1.505±0.490 1.557±0.475 1.502±0.524 1.160±0.679

0.235±0.017 0.235±0.017 0.235±0.018 0.236±0.017 0.235±0.017 0.234±0.017 0.227±0.017

32.2 32.2 32.2 65.3 65.3 65.3 345.5

Method

Table 3. Comparison on fidelity/reward/time metrics with FLUX.2Klein-4B. Best values are in bold, second-best are underlined . ntruncate

Regularization

LPIPS ↑

1-MS-SSIM ↑

Coverage ↑

Recall ↑

Base Model DRaFT-1 ReFL-5

– – –

– – –

0.505±0.073 0.401±0.069 0.431±0.070

0.857±0.113 0.757±0.102 0.779±0.103

– 0.080 0.047

– 0.010 0.002

ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM ODE-AM

1 1 1 3 3 3 20(Full)

2nd 4th 6th 2nd 4th 6th 2nd

0.448±0.078 0.420±0.074 0.424±0.073 0.454±0.074 0.432±0.075 0.450±0.073 0.449±0.065

0.832±0.111 0.801±0.109 0.804±0.102 0.843±0.104 0.810±0.111 0.813±0.115 0.817±0.098

0.376 0.204 0.139 0.306 0.224 0.396 0.262

0.129 0.037 0.012 0.057 0.042 0.083 0.106

Method

Table 4. Comparison on diversity and distribution metrics with FLUX.2Klein-4B. Best values are in bold, second-best are underlined (excluding the base model). deterministic dynamics; extending it under the stochastic maximum principle would provide a more complete theory. Finally, a principled recipe for optimal truncation, potentially through online estimation of control intensity, is left for future work. Acknowledgment: Wenpin Tang is supported by NSF CAREER Award DMS-2538791 and the Tang Family Assistant Professorship. Jiayuan Sheng and David D. Yao are part of a Columbia-CityU/HK collaborative project that is supported by InnoHK Initiative, The Government of the HKSAR and the AIFT Lab. References [1] M. S. Albergo, N. M. Boffi, and E. Vanden-Eijnden. Stochastic interpolants: a unifying framework for flows and diffusions. J. Mach. Learn. Res., 26:Paper No. [209], 80, 2025. [2] R. Bellman. Dynamic Programming. Princeton Landmarks in Mathematics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1957. Reprinted in 2010 by Princeton University Press. [3] J. Berner, L. Richter, and K. Ullrich. An optimal control perspective on diffusion-based generative modeling. Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2024. [4] K. Black, M. Janner, Y. Du, I. Kostrikov, and S. Levine. Training diffusion models with reinforcement learning. In ICLR, 2024. [5] Black Forest Labs. FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence. https://bfl.ai/blog/flux-2, 2025.

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Appendix Contents Appendix Contents Appendix A. Proof of Deterministic Optimal Control A.1. HJB equation of Deterministic Optimal Control A.2. Pontryagin Maximal Principle(PMP) on Deterministic Control A.3. Proof of Theorem 3.1 A.4. Justification to Generalized Time Horizon Appendix B. Extension to Stochastic cases B.1. Stochastic Maximum Principle (SMP) B.2. Stochastic adjoint matching B.3. General Stochastic Adjoint Matching Appendix C. Control intensity throughout denoising timesteps C.1. Variance Exploding (VE) Examples C.2. Variance Preserving (VP) Example C.3. Probability Flow Example Appendix D. Experimental Details D.1. Analysis on SiT Control Intensity D.2. Analysis on SiT Schedules D.3. Performance Evaluation on SiT D.4. Detailed Performance Evaluation on FLUX D.5. How our algorithm accelerates post-training pipeline D.6. Hyper-parameters and details in training D.7. Training curve Appendix E. Additional Images

14 15 15 15 16 16 16 17 18 19 22 22 23 24 27 27 28 30 31 33 34 35 36

15

Appendix A. Proof of Deterministic Optimal Control In this section, we derive all conclusions using a more general version of formulation (3.1) Z 1  min L(u; Xu ) = f (∥u(Xt , t)∥) + h(Xt , t) dt + g(X1 ), X0 = x. (A.1) u

0

In this main part of this paper, we set h = 0 by default. A.1. HJB equation of Deterministic Optimal Control. Consider the formulation (A.1), deterministic dynamic (3.2) and value function (3.3), we apply the dynamic programming principle on [t, t + ∆t], then obtain n o V (x, t) = min (f (∥u(x, t)∥) + h(x, t)) ∆t + V x + (v base (x, t) + u(x, t))∆t, t + ∆t . u

Expanding V to first order in ∆t yields h i 0 = min f (∥u∥) + h(x, t) + ∂t V (x, t) + ∇x V (x, t)⊤ (v base (x, t) + u) . u

The minimizing control satisfies ∇u f (∥u∥) + ∇x V (x, t) = 0. Therefore, when f is polynomial (or otherwise explicitly differentiable and invertible in a useful way), one can solve for u⋆ (x, t) pointwisely from this equation. This establishes the deterministic Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation f (∥u⋆ (x, t)∥) + h(x, t) + ∂t V (x, t) + ∇x V (x, t)⊤ (v base (x, t) + u⋆ (x, t)) = 0,

V (x, 1) = g(x).

A.2. Pontryagin Maximal Principle(PMP) on Deterministic Control. The deterministic Hamitonian of Problem (A.1) under dynamic (3.2) is   H(t, x, u, a) = a⊤ v base (x, t) + u(x, t) + f (∥u∥) + h(x, t). The Pontryagin maximum principle gives the forward-backward system  Ẋt = ∇a H(t, x, u, a) = v base (x, t) + u(x, t),    h i ⊤ base ȧt = −∇x H(t, x, u, a) = − a ∇x v (x, t) + ∇x h(x, t) ,    a1 = ∇X1 g(X1 ).

(A.2)

For u⋆ to be the optimal control, the necessary first order condition is that 0 = ∇u H(t, x, u, a) = a + ∇u f (∥u∥). at is the costate and can be defined as gradient of value function, i.e. ∇x V (x, t), which perfectly aligns with Appendix A.1. That is under deterministic optimal control perspective, HJB and PMP give the same relationship between optimal control and value function. Therefore, lean adjoint ãt acts as a reasonable surrogate in Algorithm 1.

16

A.3. Proof of Theorem 3.1. The result follows from PMP in a straightforward way. In our setup given by (A.2), since the optimal control minimizes H pointwise, we have ∇u H = f ′ (∥u∥)

u + a = 0. ∥u∥

Thus u is colinear with −a. Let r = ∥u∥. Taking norms gives f ′ (r) = ∥a∥. By invertibility of f ′ , we obtain r = (f ′ )−1 (∥a∥). Substituting back yields u⋆ = −

(f ′ )−1 (∥a∥) a. ∥a∥ 1

1

1 p Typically when f (x) = pλ x , then f ′ (x) = xp−1 /λ, we have (f ′ )−1 (y) = λ p−1 y p−1 . Substituting y = ∥at ∥ into Theorem 3.1 yields

u⋆t = −

2−p 1 (f ′ )−1 (∥at ∥) at = −λ p−1 ∥at ∥ p−1 at . ∥at ∥

A.4. Justification to Generalized Time Horizon. By the deterministic PMP theorem, we apply (A.2) on the truncated interval [t, 1], and the adjoint variable satisfies a same formulation ȧs = −∇x H(Xs , u⋆s , as , s),

a1 = −∇g(X1 ).

For all t ≤ s ≤ 1, we have ∇u H(Xs , u⋆s , as , s) = 0. With a similar argument to Appendix A.3, we yields u⋆s = −

(f ′ )−1 (∥as ∥) as . ∥as ∥

Appendix B. Extension to Stochastic cases In this section we consider the stochastic control problem  dXt = b(Xt , t) + σ(t)u(Xt , t) dt + σ(t)dBt , with objective Z 1  J(u) = E 0

  1 ∥u(Xt , t)∥2 + h(Xt , t) dt + g(X1 ) , 2

X0 given.

Here Bt is a Brownian motion and control u is adapted to the filtration generated by the noise and observations. For clear illustration, in stochastic case we only apply quadratic penalty 1 2 2 ∥ut ∥ , general form can also be derived similarly as in deterministic optimal control.

17

B.1. Stochastic Maximum Principle (SMP). For the controlled SDE, the stochastic Hamiltonian is   1 H(t, x, u, p, q) = p⊤ b(x, t) + σ(t)u + Tr q ⊤ σ(t) + ∥u∥2 + h(x, t). 2 The classical stochastic maximum principle introduces a pair of adjoint processes (pt , qt ) solving the BSDE dpt = −∇Xt H(t, Xt , ut , pt , qt )dt + qt dBt , Since σ = σ(t) is independent of x, we have h i dpt = − p⊤ t ∇x b(x, t) + ∇x h(x, t) dt + qt dBt ,

p1 = ∇X1 g(X1 ).

p1 = ∇X1 g(X1 ).

The optimality condition is 0 = ∇u H(t, Xt , ut , pt , qt ) = σ(t)⊤ pt + ut , so that u⋆t = −σ(t)⊤ pt . On a historical note, adjoint variables (or costates) are Lagrangian multipliers in control theory, representing the sensitivity of the optimal cost to changes in state. In the stochastic control setting, the adjoint variables are a pair: first-order value gradient pt and second-order correction qt from noise, which are specified by a system of backward stochastic differential equations derived from the maximum principle [49]. The “adjoint” defined in [7] is an estimate of the first-order value gradient by averaging out the noise, and can thus be viewed as a degenerate form in standard control theory. On the other hand, such-defined adjoint in deterministic control is exactly the one derived from the maximum principle. Next we will explain the intuition for both pt and qt . Intuition for pt . In the stochastic maximum principle, the adjoint process pt can be interpreted as the sensitivity of the future minimal cost with respect to the current state Xt . The value function V (t, x) in SOC setting is defined as the minimum expected future cost starting from state x at time t:   Z 1  1 2 ∥us ∥ + h(Xs , s) ds + g(X1 ) Xt = x , V (t, x) := min E u 2 t More precisely, if the value function V (x, t) is sufficiently smooth, then along the optimal trajectory one has pt = ∇x V (x, t). This is exactly the same as adjoint at in deterministic optimal control PMP setting. If pt is large in some direction, then moving the current state in that direction will significantly increase the future cost. In the control-affine case  dXt = b(Xt , t) + σ(t)ut dt + σ(t)dBt , with quadratic control cost, the optimality condition gives u⋆t = −σ(t)⊤ pt . Thus the optimal control pushes the state in the direction that decreases the future cost.

18

Intuition for qt . The process pt is itself random, because it is evaluated along the stochastic trajectory Xt driven by Brownian Motion Bt . To understand the role of qt , suppose again that the value function is smooth and pt = ∇x V (x, t). Applying Itô’s formula to pt , gradient of value function, we obtain    1  dpt = ∂t ∇x V (x, t) + ∇2x V (x, t) b(x, t) + σ(t)ut + Tr σ(t)σ(t)⊤ ∇3x V (x, t) dt+∇2x V (x, t)σ(t)dBt . 2 On the other hand, the stochastic maximum principle writes the adjoint equation as dpt = −Hx (t, Xt , ut , pt , qt )dt + qt dBt . Comparing the martingale parts of the two expressions, we get qt = ∇2x V (x, t)σ(t). Hence qt is the Brownian noise coefficient of the adjoint process pt . Since pt represents the gradient of the future cost, qt describes how this gradient changes along the stochastic noise directions. B.2. Stochastic adjoint matching. Adjoint Matching reformulates the stochastic optimal control problem as a regression-style fixed-point problem. For the controlled process   dXt = b(Xt , t) + σ(t)u(Xt , t) dt + σ(t)dBt , define the cost-to-go under a fixed control u by   Z 1  1 2 ∥u(Xs , s)∥ + h(Xs , s) ds + g(X1 ) Xt = x . J(u; x, t) := EX∼pu 2 t The value function is then V (x, t) = min J(u; x, t) = J(u⋆ ; x, t), u

and the optimal control satisfies u⋆ (x, t) = −σ(t)⊤ ∇x V (x, t) = −σ(t)⊤ ∇x J(u∗ ; x, t). Instead of constructing an importance-weighted estimator of u⋆ , Adjoint Matching directly regresses the current control toward −σ(t)⊤ ∇x J(u; x, t), so that the optimal control is characterized as the fixed point u(x, t) = −σ(t)⊤ ∇x J(u; x, t). Pathwise adjoint versus the SMP adjoint. The adjoint used in Adjoint Matching should not be confused with the classical stochastic maximum principle adjoint (pt , qt ). For a sampled trajectory X ∼ pu , this work[7] defines the pathwise adjoint Z 1    1 u 2 a(t; X , u) := ∇Xt ∥u(Xs , s)∥ + h(Xs , s) ds + g(X1 ) . 2 t This quantity is the sensitivity of the realized remaining cost along one trajectory with respect to the intermediate state Xt . It is therefore a pathwise sensitivity, not the BSDE adjoint in

19

the stochastic maximum principle. Its conditional expectation recovers the gradient of the fixed-control cost-to-go: EX∼pu [a(t; Xu , u) | Xt = x] = ∇x J(u; x, t). Consequently, only at the optimal control u = u⋆ do we obtain EX∼pu⋆ [a(t; Xu , u⋆ ) | Xt = x] = ∇x J(u⋆ ; x, t) = ∇x V (x, t). Thus the pathwise adjoint used by Adjoint Matching becomes an estimator of the valuegradient adjoint only at the optimal fixed point. Basic Adjoint Matching objective. Using the pathwise adjoint as a stochastic target, the basic Adjoint Matching loss is Z 2 1 1 X ∼ pū , LBasic-AM (u; X) = u(Xt , t) + σ(t)⊤ a(t; X, ū) dt, 2 0 where ū = stopgrad(u). This objective can be viewed as a consistency loss for the fixed-point equation u(x, t) = −σ(t)⊤ ∇x J(u; x, t). Adjoint ODE in Stochastic AM can be derived as h i d a(t; Xu , u) = − a⊤ ∇x v base (x, t) + a⊤ σ(t)∇x u(x, t) + ∇x h(x, t) + u(x, t)⊤ ∇x u(x, t) dt a(1; X) =∇X1 g(X1 ) At the optimal control, Adjoint Matching uses the fixed-point relation h i u⋆ (x, t) = E −σ(t)⊤ a(t; Xu , u⋆ ) Xt = x . Multiplying by ∇x u⋆ (x, t) gives h i E u⋆ (x, t)⊤ ∇x u⋆ (x, t) + a(t; Xu , u⋆ )⊤ σ(t)∇x u⋆ (x, t) Xt = x = 0. These are exactly the two u-dependent Jacobian terms in the full pathwise adjoint ODE. Thus, at the optimum, their conditional expectation vanishes. The lean adjoint drops these terms and uses h i d ⊤ base ã(t; X) = − ã(t; X) ∇x v (Xt , t) + ∇x h(Xt , t) , ã(1; X) = ∇X1 g(X1 ). dt Hence ã is not generally the true pathwise gradient; it is a simplified surrogate adjoint that preserves the optimal fixed point while avoiding the expensive ∇x u terms. B.3. General Stochastic Adjoint Matching. The memoryless schedule σ(t)2 = 2ηt (see Theorem 1, [7]) is a sufficient theoretical condition for robust fine-tuning results, as it cancels the initial-value bias and yields the tilted terminal law p⋆ (X1 ) ∝ pbase (X1 ) exp(r(X1 )). However, this condition is not necessarily the best choice to implement in finite-step training: since the memoryless schedule injects very large noise near early denoising times, it may overexplore highly noisy states and weaken useful reward propagation in practice. To implement this memoryless noise schedule, we have to clip near the initial noise and decrease step size for higher accuracy.

20 α′

α′

Theorem B.1. Denote κt := αtt and ηt := βt ( αtt βt − βt′ ), where αt and βt are schedules define in refence flow (2.1). Suppose we already have a flow model v base or score estimator sbase , equivalent backward sampling SDEs with noise schedule σ(t) are   2   σ (t) base dXt = κt x + (Xt , t) + σ(t)dBt + ηt s 2    σ 2 (t)κt σ 2 (t) base v (Xt , t) − Xt dt + σ(t)dBt = 1+ 2ηt 2ηt | {z } b(Xt ,t)

where the base model satisfies v base (x, t) = κt x + ηt sbase (x, t). Assume σ(t) > 0, ηt > 0, and the controlled model uθ is obtained by the difference between finetuned model and base model. Then the induced stochastic optimal control for   dXt = b(Xt , t) + σ(t)uθ (Xt , t) dt + σ(t)dBt , (B.1) is  σ(t)2 + 2ηt sθ (x, t) − sbase (x, t) 2σ(t)  σ(t)2 + 2ηt = vθ (x, t) − vbase (x, t) . 2σ(t)ηt

uθ (x, t) =

(B.2) (B.3)

Proof sketch. According to Equation (10), (11) in [7], the unified base SDE can be written as   σ(t)2 base b (x, t) = κt x + + ηt sbase (x, t). 2 After fine-tuning, the drift becomes   σ(t)2 + ηt sθ (x, t). bθ (x, t) = κt x + 2 Thus the drift difference is bθ − b

base

 =

 σ(t)2 + ηt (sθ − sbase ). 2

In the control-affine SOC form, this difference must equal σ(t)uθ :   σ(t)2 + ηt (sθ − sbase ). σ(t)uθ = 2 Hence

σ(t)2 + 2ηt σ(t)2 + 2ηt (sθ − sbase ) = (vθ − v base ). 2σ(t) 2σ(t)ηt Adjoint Matching regresses the current control onto the lean adjoint target −σ(t)⊤ ãt , so substituting this expression for uθ gives the stated loss. □ uθ =

Corollary B.2. the Adjoint Matching loss Z 1 2  σ(t)2 + 2ηt LAM (θ) = E vθ (Xt , t) − v base (Xt , t) + σ(t)⊤ ãt dt 2σ(t)ηt 0

21

is the least-squares matching objective for the control uθ under an arbitrary non-memoryless noise schedule. Algorithm 2 is the designed for KL-regularization stochastic adjoint matching with general noise schedule. Algorithm 2 Stochastic Adjoint Matching with General Noise Schedule Require: Pre-trained velocity field v base (x, t), noise schedule σ(t), step size h, number of iterations N , batch size m. 1: Initialize vθ ← v base 2: for n = 0, . . . , N − 1 do 3: Sample m trajectories {Xt }t∈{0,h,...,1} using current model via:   √  σ(t)2 vθ (Xt , t) − κt Xt + h σ(t) ϵt , ϵt ∼ N (0, I) Xt+h = Xt + h vθ (Xt , t) + 2ηt 4: Solve lean adjoint ODE backward:    σ(t)2 base ⊤ base ãt−h = ãt + h ãt ∇Xt v (Xt , t) + v (Xt , t) − κt Xt , ã1 = −∇X1 r(X1 ) 2ηt Note that both Xt and ãt should be computed without gradients, i.e. Stop gradients: Xt = stopgrad(Xt ), ãt = stopgrad(ãt ). 5: Compute loss: 2  h X σ(t)2 + 2ηt L(θ) = vθ (Xt , t) − vbase (Xt , t) + σ(t)ãt m t 2σ(t)ηt 6: Compute the gradient ∇θ L and update θ 7: end for

22

Appendix C. Control intensity throughout denoising timesteps In this section, we are motivated to train stochastic and deterministic controls with adaptive importance weights on denoising time steps. To explain the efficiency of our adaption, we analyze the tractable inconsistent monotonicity trend of control norms. For simplicity, we illustrate with 1D Gaussian priors, in which the noise schedules and the log-likelihoods of process distributions (the “score” functions) jointly contribute to unique control intensity maxima. Then we move on to the ODE analysis, in which the multi-modal mix-Gaussian priors become the principal factor that steers control intensity. Proposition C.1. Consider a one-dimensional backward process with Brownian noise schedp ule β(·): dXt = b(Xt , T − t) dt + η 2β(T − t) dBt , in which η ≥ 0 is a free parameter on injected noise, differentiable reward function r(·) is evaluated on XT at the terminal backward denoising time. If the associated adjoint [7] evolves according to d a(Xt , t) = −∇X b(Xt , T − t) a(Xt , t), dt Then the optimal control admits the form

a(XT , T ) = −∇r(XT ).

u∗ (Xt , t) = c∗β (t, T, η) ∇r(XT ), in which we define the time-aware component Z T  p c∗β (t, T, η) = η 2β(T − t) exp ∇X b(Xs , T − s) ds . t

Remark. Consequently, the monotonicity of |u∗ (Xt , t)| is determined jointly by the noise schedule β and the accumulated drift Jacobian ∇X b. In particular, if c∗β (t, T, η) has a unique critical point t∗ ∈ (0, T ), with d ∗ d ∗ cβ (t, T, η) > 0 for t < t∗ , c (t, T, η) < 0 for t > t∗ , dt dt β then both |u∗ (Xt , t)| and E|u∗ (Xt , t)| exhibits a unique maximum in t∗ ∈ [0, T ]. C.1. Variance Exploding (VE) Examples. Assume we start from a simplest Gaussian model Y0 ∼ N (0, Exploding (VE) forward √ 1) and consider its corresponding 1D RVariance t√ process dYt = 2t dBt . The VE trajectory Yt = Y0 + 0 2s dBs ∼ N (0, 1 + t2 ) follows immediately from our strong assumption on Law(Y0 ), and its score function exhibits a closed Yt form expression: ∇ log p(Yt ) = − 1+t 2 . If we fix a finite time horizon T , the backward process Xt := YT −t of our VE model is given in the form of gDDIM[51]: p (1 + η 2 )(T − t) dXt = − 2(T − t) dBt X dt + η t 1 + (T − t)2 where X0 ∼ N (0, 1 + T 2 ). By solving the t-linear ODE from Proposition C.1, we obtain 2

2

a(Xt , t) = a(XT , T )[1 + (T − t)2 ]−(1+η )/2 = −∇r(XT )[1 + (T − t)2 ]−(1+η )/2 . Therefore, the time-aware component of optimal control follows  1/2 p (T − t) 1 ∗ cV E (Xt , t) = η 2(T − t) , arg max c∗V E = T − p . 2) (1+η 2 t [1 + (T − t) ] 1 + 2η 2

23

(a) VE, T = 1

(b) VE, T = 5

(c) VE, T = 10

(d) VP, T = 1

(e) VP, T = 5

(f) VP, T = 10

Figure 6. Curves of c∗ (t, T, η) versus denoising time t under different terminal horizons T and stochasticity levels η in the 1D VE (top row) and VP (bottom row) cases. Data variance is set to 1. To illustrate the inconsistent monotonicity of u∗ , we plot the norm of c∗ against denoising time t ∈ [0, T ]. We see from Figure 6 that the maximum value of c∗ (t, T, η) is more heavily tilted towards terminal time-steps for larger T , an observation consistent with Equation (C.1). C.2. √ Variance Preserving (VP) Example. Similarly, for VP model dYt = −tYt dt + 2tdBt , Y0 ∼ N (0, 1), the marginal distribution is standard Gaussian N (0, 1). Therefore, its score function ∇ log p(Yt ) = −Yt , and the backward process of VP model is given in the form of gDDIM[51]: p dXt = −η 2 (T − t)Xt dt + η 2(T − t) dBt . With Proposition C.1, η2

2

η2

2

a(Xt , t) = a(XT , T )e− 2 (T −t) = −∇r(XT )e− 2 (T −t) , and the time-aware component of optimal control follows p η2 1 2 c∗V P (Xt , t) = η 2(T − t) · e− 2 (T −t) , arg max c∗V P = T − √ t 2η

(C.1)

Similar to 1D VE case, we plot the curve of c∗ and t in Figure 6. A similar argument can be applied to a bi-modal data prior as well: Proposition C.2. Let (Xt )0≤t≤T follow the ODE flow dXt = b(Xt , t) dt, in which pnoise = X0 ∼ N (0, T 2 ) and pdata = X1 ∼ N (−µ, 1) + N (µ, 1). (1 << µ << T ). Then the control norm has a unique extreme value at t ∈ [0, T ].

24

Rt√ Proof. Suppose Xt = X0 + 0 2t dt, Xt ∼ N (−µ, 1 + t2 ) + N (µ, 1 + t2 ), which gives  (x + µ)2  1 (x − µ)2  + exp − , p(t, x) = p exp − 2(1 + t)2 2(1 + t)2 2 2π(1 + t2 ) and s(t, x) := ∇x log p(t, x) =

µx −x + µ tanh( 1+t 2)

. 1 + t2 x When t = 0, for 0 < x < O(µ), s(0, x) = −x + µ tanh(µx) > 0. But s(x, T ) ≈ − 1+T 2 < 0. Therefore, for multimodal data, the control norm increases at t = T and decreases when t → 0. □ C.3. Probability Flow Example. To motivate the empirical effectiveness of adaptive AM algorithms on flow-based models, we study the following probability flow example. In this elementary setting, we explicitly calculate the control norm intensity, which attains a unique maximum at some later denoising time-step. Moreover, we discover that higher-order polynomial regularization f (r) = λrp /p preserves the same peak location but flattens the normalized control curves, so a broader later denoising time region remains close to the maximal control strength. This improves second-order truncated adjoint matching by keeping the neighboring control signals effective as well. Proposition C.3. Let Xt = (1 − t)X0 + tX1 , where X0 ∼ N (µ, σ 2 ) and X1 ∼ N (0, 1), then σ2 the control norm takes a unique extreme value at t∗ = 1+σ 2. Proof. Observe that Xt is the linear combination of 2 i.i.d Gaussian, so  Xt ∼ N (1 − t)µ, (1 − t)2 σ 2 + t2 and we denote (1 − t)µ := m(t) and (1 − t)2 σ 2 + t2 := D(t). Since (X1 − X0 , Xt ) is joint Gaussian, Cov(X1 − X0 , Xt ) (x − m(t)) V ar(Xt ) t − (1 − t)σ 2 = −µ + (x − m(t)) D(t) := A(t)x + B(t).

v(t) = E[X1 − X0 |Xt = x] = E[X1 − X0 ] +

Since ∇x vt (x) = A(t) and with lean adjoint formulation,  Z 1  a(t) = a(1) exp − A(s) ds t  1 Z 1 D′ (s)  = a(1) exp − ds 2 t D(s)  1  = a(1) exp − log D(t) 2 a(1) =p . (1 − t)2 σ 2 + t2

25

□ Proposition C.4 (Normalized temporal control strength). With a same setup as Proposition C.3, for generalized polynomial regularization f (r) = p1 rp (p > 1), the optimal lean-adjoint control satisfies ∥u⋆t ∥ ∝ D(t)

1 − 2(p−1)

. Let

σ2 1 + σ2 ⋆ be the unique maximizer of ∥ut ∥. Then the normalized relative control strength t⋆ =

∥u⋆t ∥

Rp (t) :=

maxs∈[0,1] ∥u⋆s ∥

is given by  Rp (t) =

D(t⋆ ) D(t)



σ2 1+σ 2 (1 − t)2 σ 2 + t2

1 2(p−1)

=

1 ! 2(p−1)

.

Remark C.1. In particular, Rp (t⋆ ) = 1 and Rp (t) ≤ 1 for all t ∈ [0, 1]. Moreover, for every fixed t ̸= t⋆ , Rp (t) is increasing in p. Therefore larger p yields a flatter normalized control profile and keeps a broader time region close to the maximal control strength. Proof. From the Gaussian interpolation calculation, ∥a(1)∥ . ∥a(t)∥ = p D(t) For f (r) = rp /(pλ), the optimality condition gives 1

1 − 2(p−1)

1

∥u⋆t ∥ = λ p−1 ∥a(t)∥ p−1 = Cp D(t)

,

where Cp = λ1/(p−1) ∥a(1)∥1/(p−1) is independent of t. Thus maximizing ∥u⋆t ∥ is equivalent to minimizing D(t). Since D′ (t) = −2(1 − t)σ 2 + 2t, the unique critical point is t⋆ =

σ2 , 1 + σ2

and D(t⋆ ) =

σ2 . 1 + σ2

Dividing ∥u⋆t ∥ by its maximum gives  Rp (t) =

D(t⋆ ) D(t)



1 2(p−1)

.

Since D(t) ≥ D(t⋆ ), we have Rp (t) ≤ 1. Finally, for t ̸= t⋆ , 0<

D(t⋆ ) < 1, D(t)

so decreasing the exponent 1/(2(p − 1)) increases Rp (t). Hence Rp (t) is increasing in p.

□

26

Figure 7. Normalized relative control strength Rp (t) for the polynomial regularizer with order p ∈ {2, 4, 6} and three noise levels σ ∈ {1.5, 2.0, 5.0}. According to Figure 7, The peak location t⋆ = σ 2 /(1 + σ 2 ) migrates toward t = 1 as σ grows (vertical dashed line in each panel), reflecting that the informative control mass concentrates near the deterministic endpoint X1 when X0 is highly diffuse. Across all σ, raising the exponent p flattens the normalized profile and widens the time region in which ∥u⋆t ∥ stays close to its maximum; the effect is modest at σ = 1.5 but dramatic at σ = 5.0, where R2 (0) ≈ 0.20 while R6 (0) ≈ 0.72.

27

Appendix D. Experimental Details D.1. Analysis on SiT Control Intensity. At each denoising step along a sampling trajectory of SiT-XL/2, we compute the per-step control utk = vθ (xtk , tk ) − vbase (xtk , tk ) and record its scaled L2 magnitude ∥utk ∥2 ∆t for each sample in a training batch. The i-th iteration panel reports per-step controls measured immediately after the i-th gradient update, e.g. “Iter 0” column shows the controls produced by the model after one optimization step, which explains the small fluctuation around zero in that row. As fine-tuning progresses, the controls grow into a coherent profile, but early steps (t ≲ 0.3) consistently accumulate less mass than later ones. This suggests that the early portion of the trajectory contributes little reward-relevant signal even after 250 iterations and is the direct empirical motivation for late-horizon truncation. The same observation also explains why a higher-order ODE AM helps. 6th ODE-AM-Full sustains non-trivial control through t = 1 where 2nd ODE-AM-Full collapses, achieving implicitly the late-horizon emphasis that Truncate-12 enforces explicitly.

Iter 0 Iter 50

1.4 1.2 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0

Iter 100

1.4 1.2 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0

Iter 150

1.4 1.2 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0

Iter 250

Control intensity

2nd ODE-AM-Full 2nd ODE-Truncate-12 2nd SDE-AM-Full 2nd SDE-Truncate-12 6th ODE-AM-Full 1.4 1.2 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0

1.4 1.2 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 0.00

0.25

0.50

t

0.75

1.00 0.00

0.25

0.50

t

0.75

1.00 0.00

0.25

0.50

t

0.75

1.00 0.00

0.25

0.50

t

0.75

1.00 0.00

0.25

0.50

t

0.75

1.00

Figure 8. Control intensity along the diffusion trajectory across fine-tuning iterations (rows) for five adjoint-matching variants (columns) on SiT-XL/2.

28

D.2. Analysis on SiT Schedules. In SiT, every sample is constructed as a stochastic interpolant xt = α(t) x1 + σ(t) x0 between data x1 and Gaussian noise x0 ∼ N (0, I), with α and σ jointly fixing the marginal of xt at every denoising time t ∈ [0, 1] (here t = 0 is noise and t = 1 is data). Because this marginal is preserved by a whole family of reverse-time SDEs, inference is free to inject extra Gaussian noise on top of the deterministic flow, h i √ dxt = vθ (xt , t) + 21 wt sθ (xt , t) dt + wt dW̄t , where wt ≥ 0 controls how much fresh noise is mixed in.

Figure 9. Interpolant coefficients α(t), σ(t), and three noise schedules wt on the Linear path {(αt , σt )}1t=0 = {(t, 1 − t)}1t=0 Although the KL family wins for pretraining (Table 6, [26]), in AM finetune, wtKL near t = 0 blows up gradients in the most chaotic part of the trajectory, while wt = 1 − t keeps injecting noise right at the early stages where exploration is not very useful (see discussion in Appendix D.1. sin2 (πt) avoids both pathologies and gives the best empirical reward finetuning performance (best reward value with best sample diversity) among the three.

Figure 10. ImageReward mean (left) reward std (right) of finetuned SiTXL/2 + SDE-AM-Full under the three SDE schedules; bold lines are 10step rolling averages.

29

D.2.1. Discussion on Memoryless Schedule. The schedule wtKL coincides exactly with the memoryless noise schedule σAM (t)2 = 2ηt formalized in [7], where ηt = βt (αt′ βt /αt − βt′ ). According to Theorem 1 in [7], this schedule is necessary for the fine-tuned model to converge to the tilted distribution p∗ (X1 ) ∝ pbase (X1 ) exp(r(X1 )) in continuous time, since it is the unique choice that X0 ⊥ X1 and thereby removes the value-function bias at t = 0. By this criterion σt and sin2 (πt) are biased. However, empirically we find that the correct injection of noise outweighs this bias (Fig. 10). Both schedules deliver the right amount of stochasticity in the middle and later stages of the trajectory to encourage exploration, while keeping noise bounded at t ≤ 0.3 so the optimization stays stable and avoids reward collapse. The truncated wtKL , by contrast, concentrates its stochasticity precisely where the adjoint signal is most fragile and is not ideal in practice.

Figure 11. From top to bottom: (1) sin2 (πt) schedule, (2) σ schedule, (3) wKL schedule. ImageNet class is lighthouse.

30

D.3. Performance Evaluation on SiT. We use 1000 class-level prompts and generate two images for each class, yielding 2000 images in total. We conduct two ablation studies on SiT to examine the effect of the truncation horizon ntruncate and the reward scale. The base SiT model obtains HPSv2 0.183, ImageReward −0.658, CLIPScore 0.239, and PickScore 0.190. Full-horizon AM already improves these metrics, with 2nd SDE-AM-Full reaching HPSv2 0.279 and 2nd ODE-AM-Full reaching HPSv2 0.290. However, both full AM variants require 83.8s per iteration, and their performance is weaker than the truncated variants. Table 5 studies higher-order ODE-AM under different reward scales with ntruncate = 10. For 4th ODE-AM-10, the best overall reward scale is 1013 , reaching ImageReward 0.574 and HPSv2 0.328. For 6th ODE-AM-10, the best configuration is reward scale 1015 , which achieves HPSv2 0.329, ImageReward 0.535, CLIPScore 0.269, and PickScore 0.207. Compared with DRaFT-1 and ReFL-10, which are faster per iteration but obtain HPSv2 around 0.296 ∼ 0.297, the higher-order AM variants provide stronger final reward alignment. Reward Scale

HPSv2 ↑

ImageReward ↑ CLIPScore ↑ PickScore ↑ Iter.Time (s) ↓

Base Model DRaFT-1 ReFL-10

– – –

0.183±0.038 0.296±0.041 0.297±0.034

−0.658±0.915 0.266±0.909 0.282±0.885

0.239±0.049 0.190±0.011 0.260±0.041 0.200±0.011 0.265±0.038 0.200±0.011

− 26.7 26.4

2nd SDE-AM-Full 2nd ODE-AM-Full

105 105

0.279±0.038 0.290±0.037

−0.084±0.989 0.185±0.967

0.244±0.052 0.197±0.012 0.243±0.049 0.199±0.012

83.8 83.8

4th ODE-AM-10 4th ODE-AM-10 4th ODE-AM-10

1011 1013 1015

0.309±0.038 0.328±0.038 0.326±0.039

0.361±0.902 0.574±0.834 0.491±0.878

0.266±0.041 0.203±0.011 0.269±0.040 0.206±0.011 0.265±0.041 0.206±0.011

47.3 47.3 47.3

6th ODE-AM-10 6th ODE-AM-10 6th ODE-AM-10

1011 1015 1019

0.327±0.039 0.329±0.039 0.328±0.039

0.531±0.872 0.535±0.862 0.497±0.871

0.265±0.040 0.206±0.011 0.269±0.039 0.207±0.011 0.261±0.041 0.205±0.011

47.7 47.7 47.7

Method

Table 5. Higher order ODE ablations: baselines (top) vs. 4th ODE-AM10 and 6th ODE-AM-10 on SiT-XL/2. Table 6 shows the effect of varying ntruncate . For both SDE and ODE samplers, increasing the truncation horizon from very small values improves the reward metrics, but the gain saturates after roughly 10–15 terminal steps. For 2nd AM-SDE, the best performance appears around ntruncate = 12, achieving ImageReward 0.522, CLIPScore 0.273, and PickScore 0.206. For 2nd AM-ODE, the best performance appears around ntruncate = 15, achieving HPSv2 0.324, ImageReward 0.522, and PickScore 0.206. At the same time, truncated AM reduces the periteration time from 83.8s to roughly 39 ∼ 57s, depending on the number of active terminal steps. Recall that we use 50 denoising steps for all SiT experiments. This confirms that most useful reward-alignment signal is concentrated near the terminal denoising stage. Overall, the ablation studies further confirm two observations. First, full-horizon AM is not the best use of computation; truncating to the final part of the trajectory is both faster and more effective. Second, higher-order ODE-AM can further improve the reward metrics when combined with a properly chosen reward scale. These results justify our use of truncated and (or) higher-order adjoint matching in the main SiT experiments.

31

Method Base Model

2nd SDE-AM

2nd SDE-AM-Full

2nd ODE-AM

2nd ODE-AM-Full

Trunc. Steps

HPSv2 ↑

ImageReward ↑ CLIPScore ↑ PickScore ↑ Iter.Time (s) ↓

–

0.183±0.038

−0.658±0.915

0.239±0.049 0.190±0.011

−

1 2 3 5 10 12 15 20

0.301±0.040 0.282±0.042 0.294±0.041 0.304±0.040 0.319±0.038 0.318±0.038 0.319±0.038 0.317±0.038

0.331±0.917 0.227±0.916 0.305±0.911 0.410±0.891 0.491±0.876 0.522±0.867 0.489±0.864 0.496±0.874

0.261±0.041 0.201±0.011 0.265±0.041 0.202±0.011 0.267±0.040 0.204±0.011 0.268±0.039 0.205±0.011 0.271±0.038 0.206±0.011 0.273±0.038 0.206±0.011 0.269±0.039 0.205±0.011 0.270±0.041 0.205±0.011

38.9 40.2 41.3 43.2 47.6 49.6 52.3 57.1

50

0.279±0.038

−0.084±0.989

0.244±0.052 0.197±0.012

83.8

1 2 3 5 10 12 15 20

0.266±0.043 0.305±0.041 0.307±0.040 0.312±0.040 0.316±0.040 0.321±0.039 0.324±0.039 0.324±0.039

0.116±0.913 0.344±0.895 0.367±0.884 0.404±0.897 0.450±0.903 0.477±0.860 0.522±0.877 0.478±0.870

0.265±0.041 0.200±0.011 0.264±0.039 0.202±0.011 0.265±0.040 0.203±0.011 0.263±0.040 0.203±0.011 0.266±0.040 0.204±0.011 0.266±0.039 0.205±0.011 0.267±0.040 0.206±0.011 0.265±0.041 0.205±0.011

39.2 40.1 40.8 42.7 47.3 49.3 52.0 56.7

50

0.290±0.037

0.185±0.967

0.243±0.049 0.199±0.012

83.8

Table 6. Effect of truncation steps in 2nd SDE-AM, 2nd ODE-AM on SiT-XL/2. D.4. Detailed Performance Evaluation on FLUX. Taking advantage of this distilled flow matching backbone, we can use fewer sampling steps; in our case, we use 20 steps for both forward sampling and adjoint ODE integration. Moreover, the conditional guidance is also distilled into this model. In contrast to the usual classifier-free guidance [15], where both conditional and unconditional velocity predictions must be evaluated, FLUX.2-Klein-4B only requires a single model evaluation at each step, which effectively helps alleviate OOM issues. For post-training, we use our truncated ODE adjoint matching algorithms, 2nd ODEAM-1 and 2nd ODE-AM-3, where only the last one and three adjoint ODE steps are integrated and included in the loss, respectively. We find that keeping more terminal adjoint matching steps does not improve training, and even made optimization slower and harder to converge, especially for full-step adjoint matching. As baselines, we consider two rewardbackpropagation methods that can be applied to flow models: DRaFT-1[6] and ReFL-5[47], where the reward signal is back-propagated through the last 1 step and through one randomly selected step among the last 5 steps, respectively. For fairness, the main methods shown in Table 3 are all trained for 500 iterations. In addition to the HPSv2 reward curve during training, we also evaluate other types of feedback, not only image-quality-related metrics such as Aesthetic Score [33], ImageReward [47], and PickScore [16], but also within-prompt diversity metrics such as LPIPS [52] and MS-SSIM [44], as well as prompt-wise mode collapse metrics, namely Recall and Recovery. Note that we generate 6 images for each prompt in the test set. For Recall and Recovery, we first extract image

32

(a) Aesthetic Score

(b) PickScore

(c) ImageReward

(d) HPSv2

Figure 12. Image fidelity metrics evaluations on FLUX.2-Klein-4B.

features using CLIP ViT-L/14[30], and set k = 5 in the kNN-based evaluation; that is, we use the distance between each image and its 5th nearest neighbor as the radius. We use only HPSv2 as the reward model during post-training, but other metrics, including Aesthetic Score, PickScore, and ImageReward, also improve substantially over the training; see Figure 13 for the evolution of image fidelity metrics through training using HPSv2. Some methods, 6th ODE-AM-1, DRaFT-1 and ReFL-5, appear to have slight advantages on training curve. However, when it comes to image diversity, methods like 2nd ODE-AM-3, 2nd ODE-AM1 and 6th ODE-AM-3, show strong potential for keep diversity; see Figure 13(A)(B) for pairwise within-prompt diversity. For simplicity, we report 1−MS-SSIM instead of MS-SSIM itself. Overall, our methods are better at preserving diversity, which is consistent with the observation in prior work[25] that methods based on direct differentiation tend not to align with the target distribution, but instead favor only some modes of it. Moreover, to examine whether fine-tuning leads to mode collapse, we also compute Recall and Coverage to measure how much the fine-tuned distribution deviates from the original base distribution. As shown in Figure 13(C)(D), our methods like 2nd ODE-AM-1 and 6th ODE-AM-3 preserve the distribution significantly better than others. One possible reason is that those high-reward training methods like DRaFT and ReFL tend to produce overly bright or visually flashy images to obtain higher reward scores, often at the cost of semantic alignment. See Figure 5 for illustration. A detailed quantitative comparison between our method and the baselines is provided in Table 3 and Table 4.

33

(a) LPIPS

(b) MS-SSIM

(c) Recall

(d) Coverage

Figure 13. Within-prompt diversity metrics and prompt-wise mode preservation metrics on FLUX.2-Klein-4B. D.5. How our algorithm accelerates post-training pipeline. In standard AM for diffusion models finetuning[7], each gradient update requires two sequential phases that both scale linearly with the number of ODE steps N . In the adjoint ODE integration phase, the adjoint signal is propagated backward through all N steps sequentially; each step requires one forward pass through the frozen base model to compute the vector-Jacobian product (VJP) with respect to the intermediate latent state. In the control loss phase, the trainable model is evaluated at each of the N trajectory states to compute the matching loss, with each evaluation requiring one forward pass through both the base and trainable models, followed by a backward pass to accumulate parameter gradients. Due to the sequential dependency between steps and memory limitations, neither phase can be trivially parallelized. For a large-scale model such as FLUX.2-Klein-4B, this results in prohibitively slow per-update wall time. Our truncated AM algorithm restricts both phases to only the final ntruncate ≪ N steps of the trajectory: the adjoint ODE is integrated backward for ntruncate steps from the terminal state, and the control loss is evaluated only at the corresponding ntruncate trajectory states. Since both phases dominate total training time and each scales linearly with the number of active steps, the per-update cost reduces proportionally. In practice, a full 20-step update requires approximately 345 seconds, whereas the 1-step truncated variant reduces this to 32 seconds.

34

D.6. Hyper-parameters and details in training. For the experimental setup, training is performed on 7 Nvidia L40S GPUs. Note that although SiT-XL/2 and FLUX.2-Klein4B are training based on flow matching objective, their convention is a bit different. While SiT-XL/2 generates images from t = 0 to t = 1, FLUX.2-Klein-4B does that from t = 1 to t = 0. In this paper, all analysis are based on t = 0 to t = 1 fashion. Parameter setting for FLUX.2-Klein-4B is shown in Table 7. We post-trained it with 7× NVIDIA L40S GPUs with 48 GB VRAM each. Category

FLUX.2-Klein-4B

SiT-XL/2-256

Adam 0.9 0.99 1 × 10−5 Cosine decay 0.01 1.0

Adam 0.9 0.99 6 × 10−5 Constant 0.0 10.0

256 20 16 10 2 × 105

256 50 8 25 1 × 105

FP32 FP32 BF16

FP32 FP32 FP32

Optimization Optimizer β1 β2 Learning Rate LR Schedule Weight Decay Gradient Clipping Training Image Size Number of Steps Batch Size Warmup Steps Reward Scale Precision Model Parameters Adjoint Trajectory Forward Pass

Table 7. Hyper-parameters for finetuning FLUX.2-Klein-4B and SiTXL/2-256 using Truncated Adjoint Matching.

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D.7. Training curve. The SiT-XL/2 training curves show that truncated and higher-order AM variants consistently outperform baselines; in particular ODE-AM-6 gives the strongest trajectory. For FLUX.2-Klein-4B, all Truncated AM methods remain competitive with the two baselines DRaFT-1 and ReFL-5.

Figure 14. HPSv2 reward mean during training with different adaptive modes on SiT-XL/2.

Figure 15. HPSv2 reward mean during training on FLUX.2-Klein-4B.

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Appendix E. Additional Images

Figure 16. Methods from left to right: (1) Base, (2) 2nd ODE-AM-Full, (3) 2nd SDE-AM-Full, (4) DRaFT-1, (5) ReFL-10, (6) 2nd SDE-AM-12, (7) 4th ODE-AM-10, (8) 6th ODE-AM-10 on SiT-XL/2.

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Prompt = ”Photo of a baby chick dressed as an inmate.”

Prompt = ”Portrait of a beautiful cyberpunk Asian female.”

Prompt = ”A siamese cat curled up in a sink”

Prompt = ”Sci-fi skill game icon in flat vector style, displayed in black and white.”

Prompt = ”A wizard casting a spell.”

Prompt = ”A Chinese dragon flying above a busy San Francisco street at night.”

Prompt = ”A volcano made of ivory vines and crimson rocks erupts with a smoke resembling a demonic eye.”

Prompt = ”Riding neon bicycles in the woods.”

Figure 17. Methods from left to right: (1) Base, (2) 2nd ODE-AM-Full, (3) 6th ODE-AM-3, (4) 4th ODE-AM-3, (5) 2nd ODE-AM-3, (6) DRaFT-1, (7) ReFL-5 on FLUX.2-Klein-4B.

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Prompt = ”1979 magazine cover featuring a traditional Japanese village in the style of Moebius.”

Prompt = ”3D cat in shape of mango fruit.”

Prompt = ”5 roman soldiers burning down a small house in a snow filled valley.”

Prompt = ”A bathroom sink with a tooth shaped toothbrush holder.”

Prompt = ”A kitchen range with food cooking in the oven and on the stove top.”

Prompt = ”A motorcycle racer is going into a turn.”

Prompt = ”A park with marble statues.”

Prompt = ”A silver park bench sits in concrete with grass behind.”

Figure 18. Methods from left to right: (1) Base, (2) 2nd ODE-AM-Full, (3) 6th ODE-AM-3, (4) 4th ODE-AM-3, (5) 2nd ODE-AM-3, (6) DRaFT-1, (7) ReFL-5 on FLUX.2-Klein-4B.

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Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University. Email address: [email protected] Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University. Email address: [email protected] Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University. Email address: [email protected] Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University. Email address: [email protected]

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