Prior-Guided Diffusion Planning for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ki, Donghyeon, Oh, JunHyeok, Shim, Seong-Woong, Lee, Byung-Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ki, Donghyeon
Oh, JunHyeok
Shim, Seong-Woong
Lee, Byung-Jun
author_facet Ki, Donghyeon
Oh, JunHyeok
Shim, Seong-Woong
Lee, Byung-Jun
contents Diffusion models have recently gained prominence in offline reinforcement learning due to their ability to effectively learn high-performing, generalizable policies from static datasets. Diffusion-based planners facilitate long-horizon decision-making by generating high-quality trajectories through iterative denoising, guided by return-maximizing objectives. However, existing guided sampling strategies such as Classifier Guidance, Classifier-Free Guidance, and Monte Carlo Sample Selection either produce suboptimal multi-modal actions, struggle with distributional drift, or incur prohibitive inference-time costs. To address these challenges, we propose Prior Guidance (PG), a novel guided sampling framework that replaces the standard Gaussian prior of a behavior-cloned diffusion model with a learnable distribution, optimized via a behavior-regularized objective. PG directly generates high-value trajectories without costly reward optimization of the diffusion model itself, and eliminates the need to sample multiple candidates at inference for sample selection. We present an efficient training strategy that applies behavior regularization in latent space, and empirically demonstrate that PG outperforms state-of-the-art diffusion policies and planners across diverse long-horizon offline RL benchmarks.Our code is available at https://github.com/ku-dmlab/PG.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10881
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Prior-Guided Diffusion Planning for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Ki, Donghyeon
Oh, JunHyeok
Shim, Seong-Woong
Lee, Byung-Jun
Machine Learning
Diffusion models have recently gained prominence in offline reinforcement learning due to their ability to effectively learn high-performing, generalizable policies from static datasets. Diffusion-based planners facilitate long-horizon decision-making by generating high-quality trajectories through iterative denoising, guided by return-maximizing objectives. However, existing guided sampling strategies such as Classifier Guidance, Classifier-Free Guidance, and Monte Carlo Sample Selection either produce suboptimal multi-modal actions, struggle with distributional drift, or incur prohibitive inference-time costs. To address these challenges, we propose Prior Guidance (PG), a novel guided sampling framework that replaces the standard Gaussian prior of a behavior-cloned diffusion model with a learnable distribution, optimized via a behavior-regularized objective. PG directly generates high-value trajectories without costly reward optimization of the diffusion model itself, and eliminates the need to sample multiple candidates at inference for sample selection. We present an efficient training strategy that applies behavior regularization in latent space, and empirically demonstrate that PG outperforms state-of-the-art diffusion policies and planners across diverse long-horizon offline RL benchmarks.Our code is available at https://github.com/ku-dmlab/PG.
title Prior-Guided Diffusion Planning for Offline Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10881