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Diffusion World Model: Future Modeling Beyond Step-by-Step Rollout for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2024-10-17 v4 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We introduce Diffusion World Model (DWM), a conditional diffusion model capable of predicting multistep future states and rewards concurrently. As opposed to traditional one-step dynamics models, DWM offers long-horizon predictions in a single forward pass, eliminating the need for recursive queries. We integrate DWM into model-based value estimation, where the short-term return is simulated by future trajectories sampled from DWM. In the context of offline reinforcement learning, DWM can be viewed as a conservative value regularization through generative modeling. Alternatively, it can be seen as a data source that enables offline Q-learning with synthetic data. Our experiments on the D4RL dataset confirm the robustness of DWM to long-horizon simulation. In terms of absolute performance, DWM significantly surpasses one-step dynamics models with a 44%44\% performance gain, and is comparable to or slightly surpassing their model-free counterparts.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.03570,
  title  = {Diffusion World Model: Future Modeling Beyond Step-by-Step Rollout for Offline Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Zihan Ding and Amy Zhang and Yuandong Tian and Qinqing Zheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.03570},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:39:25.944Z