D2PPO: Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization with Dispersive Loss

Abstract: Diffusion policies excel at robotic manipulation by naturally modeling multimodal action distributions in high-dimensional spaces. Nevertheless, diffusion policies suffer from diffusion representation collapse: semantically similar observations are mapped to indistinguishable features, ultimately impairing their ability to handle subtle but critical variations required for complex robotic manipulation. To address this problem, we propose D2PPO (Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization with Dispersive Loss). D2PPO introduces dispersive loss regularization that combats representation collapse by treating all hidden representations within each batch as negative pairs. D2PPO compels the network to learn discriminative representations of similar observations, thereby enabling the policy to identify subtle yet crucial differences necessary for precise manipulation. In evaluation, we find that early-layer regularization benefits simple tasks, while late-layer regularization sharply enhances performance on complex manipulation tasks. On RoboMimic benchmarks, D2PPO achieves an average improvement of 22.7% in pre-training and 26.1% after fine-tuning, setting new SOTA results. In comparison with SOTA, results of real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda robot show the excitingly high success rate of our method. The superiority of our method is especially evident in complex tasks. Project page: https://guowei-zou.github.io/d2ppo/