RS-Diffuser: Risk-Sensitive Diffusion Planning with Distributional Value Guidance

Offline reinforcement learning enables policy learning from fixed datasets without additional environment interaction, making it appealing for safety-critical applications where online exploration is costly or unsafe.

Diffusion-based decision-making methods have recently achieved strong performance in offline RL by modeling rich, multimodal trajectory distributions.

However, existing diffusion planners are typically risk-neutral and therefore may overlook rare but catastrophic outcomes that are crucial in real-world deployment.

In this work, we propose RS-Diffuser, a risk-sensitive offline diffusion planning framework that combines diffusion-based trajectory generation with distributional value critics.

RS-Diffuser learns a diffusion planner over future state trajectories, a separate inverse dynamics model for action decoding, and a Monte Carlo distributional critic that estimates the full return distribution of candidate plans through quantile regression.

At sampling time, we incorporate a risk-sensitive guidance signal into the denoising process, using gradients computed from tail-aware objectives such as Conditional Value at Risk to steer generation toward desired risk profiles.

As a result, a single trained model can flexibly produce risk-averse, risk-neutral, or risk-seeking behaviors by changing only the inference-time risk parameter.

Extensive experiments on risk-sensitive D4RL and risky robot navigation benchmarks demonstrate that RS-Diffuser achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving both overall return and worst-case robustness while reducing safety violations.