arXiv Machine Learning

Temporal Difference Learning for Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606. 15048v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models are typically trained with objectives that focus on local denoising targets at individual time steps (or adjacent pairs), which do not enforce consistency between predictions along the denoising trajectory.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Diffusion-Augmented Markov Decision Processes for Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces Diffusion-Augmented Markov Decision Processes (DA‑MDPs), a framework that extends Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning to diffusion-based policies. DA‑MDPs treat each reverse‑diffusion step as an RL decision, deriving a tractable reverse‑KL bound that decomposes across denoising transitions and yields diffusion‑augmented soft rewards, value functions, and policy objectives. The authors implement this framework with PPO, REPPO, and a maximum‑entropy WPO variant, showing improved continuous‑control performance, higher success rates on manipulation tasks, and memory‑efficient training with action chunking.

By Sebastian Sanokowski, Kaustubh Patil, Majid Khadiv
arXiv AI
Jun 16

QPILOTS: Efficient Test-Time Q-Steering for Flow Policies

arXiv:2606. 14801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow-matching and diffusion policies are expressive action generators, but optimizing them with temporal-difference reinforcement learning (RL) remains difficult.

By Yifan Ruan, Chenyang Cao, Andreas Burger, Ali Pesaranghader, Kaveh Kamali, Jaehong Kim, Nandita Vijaykumar, Alan Aspuru-Guzik, Igor Gilitschenski, Nicholas Rhinehart
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 17

A Continuous-Time Reinforcement Learning Framework for Fine-Tuning Discrete Diffusion Models

arXiv:2607. 14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We formulate reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time with discrete state spaces and possibly arbitrary action spaces via a stochastic control approach, where the state dynamics are modeled as a controlled continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC).

By Zikun Zhang, Jiayuan Sheng, David D. Yao, Wenpin Tang