GraftOOD: Grafting Out-of-Distribution Exemplars into Advantage-Weighted Rectification for Video Reward Optimization

Abstract

Video reward optimization can increase proxy rewards while reducing video dynamics, a mismatch we identify as \emph{motion collapse}, including under a video-level motion-quality reward. We propose \textbf{GraftOOD}, which replaces part of the online rollouts in selected prompt groups with out-of-distribution video exemplars. A shared velocity-regression objective combines group-relative reward rectification with sequence-level exemplar supervision, requiring neither exemplar generation trajectories nor an additional supervised-loss coefficient. We characterize its pointwise optimal field as a source-posterior-weighted combination of the two source-specific target fields. We construct \textbf{GraftSet-Video}, containing 9,588 format-matched exemplars for 2,397 prompts, to supply external supervision. On Wan2.1-1.3B, GraftOOD raises Dynamic Degree from 4.86 to 44.41 relative to reward-only FlowAWR, while HPSv3 decreases from 8.10 to 7.32 and VisionReward remains close. At the main setting, GraftOOD leads nine of ten metrics among three exemplar-augmented methods. Ablations of exemplar frequency and within-group count reveal dynamics--reward trade-offs rather than uniform gains from increasing exemplar usage. These results support external exemplar supervision as a complement to scalar reward feedback, without equating higher measured dynamics with coherent, visually plausible motion in the generated videos. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/Fuzm7/FlowAWR}{GraftOOD}.