Exploratory Diffusion Model for Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ying, Chengyang, Chen, Huayu, Zhou, Xinning, Hao, Zhongkai, Su, Hang, Zhu, Jun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ying, Chengyang
Chen, Huayu
Zhou, Xinning
Hao, Zhongkai
Su, Hang
Zhu, Jun
author_facet Ying, Chengyang
Chen, Huayu
Zhou, Xinning
Hao, Zhongkai
Su, Hang
Zhu, Jun
contents Unsupervised reinforcement learning (URL) aims to pre-train agents by exploring diverse states or skills in reward-free environments, facilitating efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. As the agent cannot access extrinsic rewards during unsupervised exploration, existing methods design intrinsic rewards to model the explored data and encourage further exploration. However, the explored data are always heterogeneous, posing the requirements of powerful representation abilities for both intrinsic reward models and pre-trained policies. In this work, we propose the Exploratory Diffusion Model (ExDM), which leverages the strong expressive ability of diffusion models to fit the explored data, simultaneously boosting exploration and providing an efficient initialization for downstream tasks. Specifically, ExDM can accurately estimate the distribution of collected data in the replay buffer with the diffusion model and introduces the score-based intrinsic reward, encouraging the agent to explore less-visited states. After obtaining the pre-trained policies, ExDM enables rapid adaptation to downstream tasks. In detail, we provide theoretical analyses and practical algorithms for fine-tuning diffusion policies, addressing key challenges such as training instability and computational complexity caused by multi-step sampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ExDM outperforms existing SOTA baselines in efficient unsupervised exploration and fast fine-tuning downstream tasks, especially in structurally complicated environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_07279
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploratory Diffusion Model for Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning
Ying, Chengyang
Chen, Huayu
Zhou, Xinning
Hao, Zhongkai
Su, Hang
Zhu, Jun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Unsupervised reinforcement learning (URL) aims to pre-train agents by exploring diverse states or skills in reward-free environments, facilitating efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. As the agent cannot access extrinsic rewards during unsupervised exploration, existing methods design intrinsic rewards to model the explored data and encourage further exploration. However, the explored data are always heterogeneous, posing the requirements of powerful representation abilities for both intrinsic reward models and pre-trained policies. In this work, we propose the Exploratory Diffusion Model (ExDM), which leverages the strong expressive ability of diffusion models to fit the explored data, simultaneously boosting exploration and providing an efficient initialization for downstream tasks. Specifically, ExDM can accurately estimate the distribution of collected data in the replay buffer with the diffusion model and introduces the score-based intrinsic reward, encouraging the agent to explore less-visited states. After obtaining the pre-trained policies, ExDM enables rapid adaptation to downstream tasks. In detail, we provide theoretical analyses and practical algorithms for fine-tuning diffusion policies, addressing key challenges such as training instability and computational complexity caused by multi-step sampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ExDM outperforms existing SOTA baselines in efficient unsupervised exploration and fast fine-tuning downstream tasks, especially in structurally complicated environments.
title Exploratory Diffusion Model for Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07279