让扩散策略通过反向传播优化,提升机器人决策的样本效率与稳定性。
Fine-tuning Diffusion Policies with Backpropagation Through Diffusion Timesteps
- 将扩散策略重构为噪声条件确定性策略,实现时间步反向传播。
- 从零训练时样本效率媲美MLP+PPO,多任务表现更优。
- 对去噪步骤数不敏感,适合实际部署中的复杂场景。
扩散策略在机器人、游戏和自动驾驶等决策场景中广泛应用,因其强大的表示能力可从示范数据中学习多样技能。然而,示范数据的次优与覆盖不足可能导致生成轨迹质量差甚至灾难性失败。虽强化学习微调被视作可行方案,但现有方法难以有效将近端策略优化(PPO)适配至扩散模型,根源在于去噪过程中动作似然估计计算不可行,导致优化目标复杂。我们实验发现,从随机初始化开始,在线微调扩散策略的样本效率远低于直接在MLP策略上应用PPO(MLP+PPO)。为此,提出NCDPO框架,将扩散策略重构为噪声条件确定性策略。通过将每个去噪步骤视为基于预采样噪声的可微变换,实现所有去噪时间步的似然评估与梯度反传。实验表明,NCDPO在从零训练时达到与MLP+PPO相当的样本效率,在连续机器人控制与多智能体游戏等多种基准上均优于现有方法;且其性能对扩散策略去噪步数不敏感,具备强鲁棒性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Diffusion policies, widely adopted in decision-making scenarios such as robotics, gaming and autonomous driving, are capable of learning diverse skills from demonstration data due to their high representation power. However, the sub-optimal and limited coverage of demonstration data could lead to diffusion policies that generate sub-optimal trajectories and even catastrophic failures. While reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has emerged as a promising solution to address these limitations, existing approaches struggle to effectively adapt Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to diffusion models. This challenge stems from the computational intractability of action likelihood estimation during the denoising process, which leads to complicated optimization objectives. In our experiments starting from randomly initialized policies, we find that online tuning of Diffusion Policies demonstrates much lower sample efficiency compared to directly applying PPO on MLP policies (MLP+PPO). To address these challenges, we introduce NCDPO, a novel framework that reformulates Diffusion Policy as a noise-conditioned deterministic policy. By treating each denoising step as a differentiable transformation conditioned on pre-sampled noise, NCDPO enables tractable likelihood evaluation and gradient backpropagation through all diffusion timesteps. Our experiments demonstrate that NCDPO achieves sample efficiency comparable to MLP+PPO when training from scratch, outperforming existing methods in both sample efficiency and final performance across diverse benchmarks, including continuous robot control and multi-agent game scenarios. Furthermore, our experimental results show that our method is robust to the number denoising timesteps in the Diffusion Policy.
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