Steepest Guidance: A Practical and Principled Approach to Inference-Time Alignment of Flow and Diffusion-based Models

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.39091v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time alignment of flow and diffusion-based models is critical for achieving flexible generative modeling. Theoretically, Doob's $h$-transform provides an elegant solution to this problem, and most existing methods are based on this principle. However, in practice, estimating the optimal guidance derived from Doob's $h$-transform at inference time is challenging. To deal with this issue, we regard inference-time alignment as a sequential