DPAIL: Training Diffusion Policy for Adversarial Imitation Learning without Policy Optimization

Human experts employ diverse strategies to complete a task, producing to multi-modal demonstration data. Although traditional Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) methods have achieved notable success, they often collapse theses multi-modal behaviors into a single strategy, failing to replicate expert behaviors. To overcome this limitation, we propose DPAIL , an adversarial IL framework that leverages diffusion models as a policy class to enhance expressiveness. Building on the Adversarial Soft Advantage Fitting (ASAF) framework, which removes the need for policy optimization steps, DPAIL trains a diffusion policy using a binary cross-entropy objective to distinguish expert trajectories from generated ones. To enable optimization of the diffusion policy, we introduce a novel, tractable lower bound on the policy’s likelihood. Through comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations against various baselines, we demonstrate that our method not only captures diverse behaviors but also remains robust as the number of behavior modes increases.