pith. sign in

arxiv: 2311.01223 · v4 · pith:KAR2WV3Gnew · submitted 2023-11-02 · 💻 cs.LG · cs.AI

Diffusion Models for Reinforcement Learning: A Survey

classification 💻 cs.LG cs.AI
keywords modelsdiffusionsurveychallengesgithublearningreinforcementresearch
0
0 comments X
read the original abstract

Diffusion models surpass previous generative models in sample quality and training stability. Recent works have shown the advantages of diffusion models in improving reinforcement learning (RL) solutions. This survey aims to provide an overview of this emerging field and hopes to inspire new avenues of research. First, we examine several challenges encountered by RL algorithms. Then, we present a taxonomy of existing methods based on the roles of diffusion models in RL and explore how the preceding challenges are addressed. We further outline successful applications of diffusion models in various RL-related tasks. Finally, we conclude the survey and offer insights into future research directions. We are actively maintaining a GitHub repository for papers and other related resources in utilizing diffusion models in RL: https://github.com/apexrl/Diff4RLSurvey.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 13 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. From Noise to Control: Parameterized Diffusion Policies

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Parameterized Diffusion Policy learns a behavior manifold to condition diffusion policies on low-dimensional continuous parameters, enabling interpolation between strategies and adaptation to novel constraints without...

  2. Aligning Flow Map Policies with Optimal Q-Guidance

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Flow map policies enable fast one-step inference for flow-based RL policies, and FMQ provides an optimal closed-form Q-guided target for offline-to-online adaptation under trust-region constraints, achieving SOTA performance.

  3. Muninn: Your Trajectory Diffusion Model But Faster

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Muninn accelerates diffusion trajectory planners up to 4.6x by spending an uncertainty budget to decide when to cache denoiser outputs, preserving performance and certifying bounded deviation from full computation.

  4. TacticGen: Grounding Adaptable and Scalable Generation of Football Tactics

    cs.AI 2026-04 conditional novelty 7.0

    TacticGen generates realistic, adaptable football tactics via a multi-agent diffusion transformer trained on 3.3M events and 100M frames, supporting rule-, language-, or model-based guidance at inference time.

  5. Rectified Schr\"odinger Bridge Matching for Few-Step Visual Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    RSBM exploits velocity field invariance across regularization levels to achieve over 94% cosine similarity and 92% success in visual navigation using only 3 integration steps.

  6. Improved Sample Complexity For Diffusion Model Training Without Empirical Risk Minimizer Access

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    The paper establishes an O(ε^{-4}) sample complexity bound for score estimation in diffusion models without requiring access to the empirical risk minimizer.

  7. RS-Diffuser: Risk-Sensitive Diffusion Planning with Distributional Value Guidance

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RS-Diffuser integrates diffusion planners, quantile regression critics, and CVaR-style guidance to produce risk-averse to risk-seeking behaviors from one model in offline RL.

  8. Fast and Highly Expressive Policy Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning via Bootstrapped Flow Q-Learning

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BFQ enables single-step noise-to-action mapping in offline RL by dividing flow-path displacements into bootstrappable short-range components learned from marginal velocity.

  9. Conditional Graph Diffusion for Negotiation Support: Overcoming Discrete Infeasibility and Preference Elicitation Gaps

    cs.GT 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Conditional Graph Diffusion generates continuous negotiation outcomes with high individual rationality using GATv2 encoders, cross-attention fusion, and inference-time normative guidance gradients.

  10. Global Convergence of Sampling-Based Nonconvex Optimization through Diffusion-Style Smoothing

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Recasts sampling-based nonconvex optimization as smoothed gradient descent to obtain non-asymptotic convergence guarantees and introduces the DIDA annealed algorithm that converges to the global optimum.

  11. Ada-Diffuser: Latent-Aware Adaptive Diffusion for Decision-Making

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Ada-Diffuser is a causal diffusion model that jointly learns observed interaction structure and underlying latent dynamics from minimal observations for adaptive planning and policy learning.

  12. Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization

    cs.RO 2024-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DPPO fine-tunes diffusion policies via policy gradients and outperforms prior RL approaches for diffusion policies and PG-tuned alternatives on robot benchmarks while enabling stable training and hardware deployment.

  13. From Denoising to Decision Making: A Survey on Diffusion Model-Enabled Deep Reinforcement Learning for Wireless Networks

    eess.SP 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    A survey compiling DM-enabled DRL algorithms and applications across computation offloading, UAV systems, resource allocation, security, and robotics in wireless networks.