SGA-Flow-GRPO: Spatial Gradient-Guided Credit Assignment for Flow-GRPO

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven effective in aligning flow-based generative models with human preferences. Recently, Flow-GRPO has emerged as an efficient critic-free paradigm by calculating advantages over sampled candidate trajectories. However, standard Flow-GRPO applies a uniform scalar advantage across both temporal denoising steps and spatial latent dimensions, without explicitly accounting for the spatial structure of generated images, which may lead to sub-optimal policy updates. To address this, we propose a novel gradient-guided spatial credit assignment framework tailored for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). We first reformulate the transition-level log-likelihood in Flow-GRPO into a token-wise representation natively aligned with DiT patch architectures, constructing spatially fine-grained importance sampling ratios. To allocate localized credit without rigid, boundary-sensitive segmentation heuristics, we introduce a continuous spatial credit map derived from reward gradients. Crucially, we employ an outlier-robust normalization scheme based on Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) coupled with temperature scaling, effectively eliminating gradient noise while highlighting functional prompt-aligned regions. Extensive evaluations on GenEval show that our approach delivers SOTA alignment quality, achieving a convergence rate comparable to top-tier methods like DiffusionNFT while substantially improving upon Flow-GRPO-based methods in alignment performance.