D-OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Continuously Tuning Step-Distilled Diffusion Models

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

This paper introduces D-OPSD, a novel training paradigm for step-distilled diffusion models that enables on-policy self-distillation during supervised fine-tuning. It allows models to learn new concepts or styles without compromising their efficient few-step inference capabilities.

The landscape of high-performance image generation models is currently shifting from the inefficient multi-step ones to the efficient few-step counterparts (e.g, Z-Image-Turbo and FLUX.2-klein). However, these models present significant challenges for directly continuous supervised fine-tuning. For example, applying the commonly used fine-tuning technique would compromises their inherent few-step inference capability. To address this, we propose D-OPSD, a novel training paradigm for step-distilled diffusion models that enables on-policy learning during supervised fine-tuning. We first find that the modern diffusion model where the LLM/VLM serves as the encoder can inherit its encoder's in-context capabilities. This enables us to make the training as an on-policy self-distillation process. Specifically, during training, we make the model acts as both the teacher and the student with different contexts, where the student is conditioned only on the text feature, while the teacher is conditioned on the multimodal feature of both the text prompt and the target image. Training minimizes the two predicted distributions over the student's own roll-outs. By optimized on the model's own trajectory and under it's own supervision, D-OPSD enables the model to learn new concept, style, etc. without sacrificing the original few-step capacity.
Original Article
View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 05/08/26, 08:12 AM

Paper page - D-OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Continuously Tuning Step-Distilled Diffusion Models

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.05204 Authors:

,

,

,

,

,

,

,

,

,

Abstract

A new training approach called D-OPSD enables efficient supervised fine-tuning for diffusion models by leveraging on-policy self-distillation with text and multimodal features while preserving few-step inference capabilities.

The landscape of high-performance image generation models is currently shifting from the inefficient multi-step ones to the efficient few-step counterparts (e.g, Z-Image-Turbo and FLUX.2-klein). However, these models present significant challenges for directly continuoussupervised fine-tuning. For example, applying the commonly used fine-tuning technique would compromises their inherentfew-step inferencecapability. To address this, we propose D-OPSD, a novel training paradigm forstep-distilled diffusion modelsthat enableson-policy learningduringsupervised fine-tuning. We first find that the modern diffusion model where the LLM/VLM serves as the encoder can inherit its encoder’s in-context capabilities. This enables us to make the training as an on-policyself-distillationprocess. Specifically, during training, we make the model acts as both the teacher and the student with different contexts, where the student is conditioned only on thetext feature, while the teacher is conditioned on themultimodal featureof both the text prompt and the target image. Training minimizes the two predicted distributions over the student’s own roll-outs. By optimized on the model’s own trajectory and under it’s own supervision, D-OPSD enables the model to learn new concept, style, etc. without sacrificing the original few-step capacity.

View arXiv pageView PDFProject pageGitHub24Add to collection

Get this paper in your agent:

hf papers read 2605\.05204

Don’t have the latest CLI?curl \-LsSf https://hf\.co/cli/install\.sh \| bash

Models citing this paper0

No model linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2605.05204 in a model README.md to link it from this page.

Datasets citing this paper0

No dataset linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2605.05204 in a dataset README.md to link it from this page.

Spaces citing this paper0

No Space linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2605.05204 in a Space README.md to link it from this page.

Collections including this paper1

Similar Articles

Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning [pdf]

Hacker News Top

Introduces Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT), a method that enables on-policy learning from demonstrations to achieve continual learning without catastrophic forgetting, outperforming supervised fine-tuning.

On-policy distillation: one of the hottest terms on PapersWithCode [R]

Reddit r/MachineLearning

Hugging Face's Niels introduces On-policy Distillation (OPD), a key post-training technique used in models like Qwen 3.6/3.7, GLM-5.1, and DeepSeek-V4, now featured on PapersWithCode with a linked whiteboard explanation by Sasha Rush and Dwarkesh Patel.