Variational Distillation of Diffusion Policies into Mixture of Experts

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhou, Hongyi, Blessing, Denis, Li, Ge, Celik, Onur, Jia, Xiaogang, Neumann, Gerhard, Lioutikov, Rudolf
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913553970102272
author Zhou, Hongyi
Blessing, Denis
Li, Ge
Celik, Onur
Jia, Xiaogang
Neumann, Gerhard
Lioutikov, Rudolf
author_facet Zhou, Hongyi
Blessing, Denis
Li, Ge
Celik, Onur
Jia, Xiaogang
Neumann, Gerhard
Lioutikov, Rudolf
contents This work introduces Variational Diffusion Distillation (VDD), a novel method that distills denoising diffusion policies into Mixtures of Experts (MoE) through variational inference. Diffusion Models are the current state-of-the-art in generative modeling due to their exceptional ability to accurately learn and represent complex, multi-modal distributions. This ability allows Diffusion Models to replicate the inherent diversity in human behavior, making them the preferred models in behavior learning such as Learning from Human Demonstrations (LfD). However, diffusion models come with some drawbacks, including the intractability of likelihoods and long inference times due to their iterative sampling process. The inference times, in particular, pose a significant challenge to real-time applications such as robot control. In contrast, MoEs effectively address the aforementioned issues while retaining the ability to represent complex distributions but are notoriously difficult to train. VDD is the first method that distills pre-trained diffusion models into MoE models, and hence, combines the expressiveness of Diffusion Models with the benefits of Mixture Models. Specifically, VDD leverages a decompositional upper bound of the variational objective that allows the training of each expert separately, resulting in a robust optimization scheme for MoEs. VDD demonstrates across nine complex behavior learning tasks, that it is able to: i) accurately distill complex distributions learned by the diffusion model, ii) outperform existing state-of-the-art distillation methods, and iii) surpass conventional methods for training MoE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_12538
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Variational Distillation of Diffusion Policies into Mixture of Experts
Zhou, Hongyi
Blessing, Denis
Li, Ge
Celik, Onur
Jia, Xiaogang
Neumann, Gerhard
Lioutikov, Rudolf
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
This work introduces Variational Diffusion Distillation (VDD), a novel method that distills denoising diffusion policies into Mixtures of Experts (MoE) through variational inference. Diffusion Models are the current state-of-the-art in generative modeling due to their exceptional ability to accurately learn and represent complex, multi-modal distributions. This ability allows Diffusion Models to replicate the inherent diversity in human behavior, making them the preferred models in behavior learning such as Learning from Human Demonstrations (LfD). However, diffusion models come with some drawbacks, including the intractability of likelihoods and long inference times due to their iterative sampling process. The inference times, in particular, pose a significant challenge to real-time applications such as robot control. In contrast, MoEs effectively address the aforementioned issues while retaining the ability to represent complex distributions but are notoriously difficult to train. VDD is the first method that distills pre-trained diffusion models into MoE models, and hence, combines the expressiveness of Diffusion Models with the benefits of Mixture Models. Specifically, VDD leverages a decompositional upper bound of the variational objective that allows the training of each expert separately, resulting in a robust optimization scheme for MoEs. VDD demonstrates across nine complex behavior learning tasks, that it is able to: i) accurately distill complex distributions learned by the diffusion model, ii) outperform existing state-of-the-art distillation methods, and iii) surpass conventional methods for training MoE.
title Variational Distillation of Diffusion Policies into Mixture of Experts
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12538