Designing Instance-Level Sampling Schedules via REINFORCE with James-Stein Shrinkage

Peiyu Yu, Suraj Kothawade, Sirui Xie, Ying Nian Wu, Hongliang Fei; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 36040-36050

Most post-training methods for text-to-image samplers focus on the model weights: either fine-tuning the backbone for alignment or distilling it for few-step efficiency. We take a different route: rescheduling the sampling timeline of a frozen sampler. Instead of a fixed, global schedule, we learn instance-level (prompt- and noise-conditioned) schedules through a single-pass Dirichlet policy. To ensure accurate gradient estimates in high-dimensional policy learning, we introduce a novel reward baseline based on a principled James-Stein estimator; it provably achieves lower estimation errors than commonly used variants and leads to superior results. Our rescheduled samplers consistently improve text-image alignment including text rendering and compositional control across modern Stable Diffusion and Flux model families.Additionally, a 5-step Flux-Dev sampler with our schedules can attain generation quality comparable to deliberately distilled samplers like Flux-Schnell. We thus position our scheduling framework as an emerging model-agnostic post-training lever that unlocks additional generative potential in pretrained samplers.