Diffusion Actor-Critic: Formulating Constrained Policy Iteration as Diffusion Noise Regression for Offline Reinforcement Learning

In offline reinforcement learning, it is necessary to manage out-of-distribution actions to prevent overestimation of value functions. One class of methods, the policy-regularized method, addresses this problem by constraining the target policy to stay close to the behavior policy. Although several approaches suggest representing the behavior policy as an expressive diffusion model to boost performance, it remains unclear how to regularize the target policy given a diffusion-modeled behavior sampler. In this paper, we propose Diffusion Actor-Critic (DAC) that formulates the Kullback-Leibler (KL) constraint policy iteration as a diffusion noise regression problem, enabling direct representation of target policies as diffusion models. Our approach follows the actor-critic learning paradigm in which we alternatively train a diffusion-modeled target policy and a critic network. The actor training loss includes a soft Q-guidance term from the Q-gradient. The soft Q-guidance is based on the theoretical solution of the KL constraint policy iteration, which prevents the learned policy from taking out-of-distribution actions. We demonstrate that such diffusion-based policy constraint, along with the coupling of the lower confidence bound of the Q-ensemble as value targets, not only preserves the multi-modality of target policies, but also contributes to stable convergence and strong performance in DAC. Our approach is evaluated on D4RL benchmarks and outperforms the state-of-the-art in nearly all environments. Code is available atthis https URL.

@article{fang2025_2405.20555,
  title={ Diffusion Actor-Critic: Formulating Constrained Policy Iteration as Diffusion Noise Regression for Offline Reinforcement Learning },
  author={ Linjiajie Fang and Ruoxue Liu and Jing Zhang and Wenjia Wang and Bing-Yi Jing },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.20555},
  year={ 2025 }
}