Reward Score Matching: Unifying Reward-based Fine-tuning for Flow and Diffusion Models

Abstract

Reward-based fine-tuning steers a pretrained diffusion or flow-based generative model toward higher-reward samples while remaining close to the pretrained model. Although existing methods are derived from different perspectives, we show that many can be written under a common framework, which we call reward score matching (RSM). Under this view, alignment becomes score matching against a value-guided target, and the main differences across methods reduce to the construction of the value-guidance estimator and the effective optimization strength across timesteps. This unification clarifies the bias-variance-compute tradeoffs of existing designs, and distinguishes core optimization components from auxiliary mechanisms that add complexity without clear benefit. Guided by this perspective, we develop simpler, more efficient redesigns across representative differentiable and black-box reward alignment tasks. Overall, RSM turns a seemingly fragmented collection of reward-based fine-tuning methods into a smaller, more interpretable, and more actionable design space. Code is available at https://github.com/jaylee2000/rsm.