SIMPLE HIERARCHICAL PLANNING WITH DIFFUSION

Diffusion-based generative methods have proven effective in modeling trajectories with offline datasets. However, they often face computational challenges and can falter in generalization, especially in capturing temporal abstractions for long- horizon tasks. To overcome this, we introduce the Hierarchical Diffuser, a simple, fast, yet surprisingly effective planning method combining the advantages of hi- erarchical and diffusion-based planning. Our model adopts a “jumpy” planning strategy at the higher level, which allows it to have a larger receptive field but at a lower computational cost—a crucial factor for diffusion-based planning methods, as we have empirically verified. Additionally, the jumpy sub-goals guide our low- level planner, facilitating a fine-tuning stage and further improving our approach’s effectiveness. We conducted empirical evaluations on standard offline reinforce- ment learning benchmarks, demonstrating our method’s superior performance and efficiency in terms of training and planning speed compared to the non-hierarchical Diffuser as well as other hierarchical planning methods. Moreover, we explore our model’s generalization capability, particularly on how our method improves generalization capabilities on compositional out-of-distribution tasks