Title: Fine-tuning Diffusion Policies with Backpropagation Through Diffusion Timesteps
Primary area: reinforcement learning
Keywords: reinforcement learning, diffusion policy

Abstract: 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. This formulation enables direct optimization over the final denoised interactive actions without increasing MDP lengths. 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 (with both state and vision inputs) and multi-agent coordination tasks. Furthermore, our experimental results show that our method is robust to the number denoising timesteps.