arXiv Machine Learning

Learning When to Stop: Prefix-Optimal Dynamic Diffusion Policies for Continuous Control

arXiv:2608. 05084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion policies are a powerful policy class for continuous control, but their iterative denoising process creates a substantial computational bottleneck.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

On-Policy Self-Distillation in Diffusion Models

The paper introduces DiffusionOPSD, an on‑policy self‑distillation framework that transforms image‑level reinforcement learning rewards into explicit targets for intermediate denoising predictions in diffusion models. By generating trajectories with a frozen behavior policy and constructing bounded positive and negative targets around query states, the method trains a policy to fit these targets before updating the behavior policy via an exponential moving average. Experiments on SD 3.5‑M and Z‑Image‑Turbo show that DiffusionOPSD achieves the best held‑out scores in 19 of 20 reward‑matched settings, outperforms the strongest competitor by up to 44 % and cuts GPU‑hour usage by 40–63 % compared to DiffusionNFT.

By Wei Zhou, Xiongwei Zhu, Lingdong Kong, Bo Chen, Lei Zhang, Yongyuan Liang, Xiaoxia Hou, Ye Tian, Xian Sun, Yingshuo Wang, Linfeng Li, Shengqiong Wu, Leigang Qu, Feng Li, Wei Liu, Julian McAuley, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv AI
Oct 1

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 AI
Aug 3

RAPiD: Reward-Guided Consistency Distillation of Diffusion Planners for Real-Time Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2602. 07339v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based trajectory planners can model multi-modal driving behavior, but their iterative denoising process introduces a latency bottleneck for real-time closed-loop deployment.

By Ruturaj Reddy, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Junn Yong Loo, Thanh Thi Nguyen, Ganesh Krishnasamy
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

STITCH-OPE: Trajectory Stitching with Guided Diffusion for Off-Policy Evaluation

STITCH-OPE is a model‑based generative framework that uses denoising diffusion to perform off‑policy evaluation (OPE) in high‑dimensional, long‑horizon settings. It generates synthetic trajectories for a target policy by guiding a diffusion model trained on behavior data, subtracting the behavior policy’s score to avoid over‑regularization and stitching partial trajectories to extend horizon length. The authors provide theoretical variance‑reduction guarantees and demonstrate improved mean squared error, correlation, and regret on D4RL and OpenAI Gym benchmarks.

By Hossein Goli, Michael Gimelfarb, Nathan Samuel de Lara, Haruki Nishimura, Masha Itkina, Florian Shkurti
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 24

Accelerating Video Diffusion via Training-Free Trajectory Routing

Accelerating Video Diffusion via Training-Free Trajectory Routing (TRACK) introduces a heterogeneous denoising strategy that switches between large and small diffusion models at selected steps, determined by a calibration process that measures disagreement between model predictions. By routing quality-sensitive steps to the large model and low-disagreement steps to the small model, TRACK achieves significant speedups—up to 2.73×—across several video diffusion benchmarks while maintaining comparable quality and diversity. The method requires no retraining, architectural changes, or online dual-model evaluation, making it a practical acceleration paradigm for video diffusion.