Sample Reward Soups: Query-efficient Multi-Reward Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Recent advances in inference-time alignment of diffusion models have shown reduced susceptibility to reward over-optimization. However, when aligning with multiple black-box reward functions, the number of required queries grows exponentially with the number of reward functions, making the alignment process highly inefficient. To address the challenge, we propose the first inference-time soup strategy, named Sample Reward Soups (SRSoup), for Pareto-optimal sampling across the entire space of preferences. Specifically, at each denoising step, we independently steer multiple denoising distributions using reward-guided search gradients (one for each reward function) and then linearly interpolate their search gradients. This design is effective because sample rewards can be shared when two denoising distributions are close, particularly during the early stages of the denoising process. As a result, SRSoup significantly reduces the number of queries required in the early stages without sacrificing performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SRSoup in aligning T2I models with diverse reward functions, establishing a practical and scalable solution. The code is available at https://github.com/EvaFlower/Sample-Reward-Soups-ICLR26.