Fast and Stable Diffusion Planning through Variational Adaptive Weighting

Abstract: Diffusion models have recently shown promise in offline RL. However, these methods often suffer from high training costs and slow convergence, particularly when using transformer-based denoising backbones. While several optimization strategies have been proposed -- such as modified noise schedules, auxiliary prediction targets, and adaptive loss weighting -- challenges remain in achieving stable and efficient training. In particular, existing loss weighting functions typically rely on neural network approximators, which can be ineffective in early training phases due to limited generalization capacity of MLPs when exposed to sparse feedback in the early training stages. In this work, we derive a variationally optimal uncertainty-aware weighting function and introduce a closed-form polynomial approximation method for its online estimation under the flow-based generative modeling framework. We integrate our method into a diffusion planning pipeline and evaluate it on standard offline RL benchmarks. Experimental results on Maze2D and Kitchen tasks show that our method achieves competitive performance with up to 10 times fewer training steps, highlighting its practical effectiveness.