DPDP: Diffusion Policy-Steered Diffusion Planner for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Ruyi An, Mingyuan Zhou

In offline reinforcement learning, diffusion models fill two roles with complementary strengths. Typically guided by a critic, a diffusion policy is value-aware and favors high-return, behavior-supported actions, but it is short-sighted: it never lays out the states it intends to visit. A diffusion planner is far-sighted, synthesizing such a long-horizon trajectory, but it is only behavior-driven at execution, realizing each planned transition using only offline behavior.Each is strong exactly where the other is weak. We introduce DPDP to bring them together at the planner's execution step, where a planned transition becomes an action. Reading the planner's inverse-dynamics executor as a posterior over actions: the environment's transition likelihood relates an action to the planned next state, while the behavioral prior determines its weight under the offline data. Replacing this prior with a value-optimized diffusion policy preserves the planned transition likelihood and favors valuable actions that can serve the plan. We target the resulting clean-action distribution in two ways. A training-free sampler composes policy and inverse-dynamics scores at matched action noise levels…