Diffusion Models for Decision Making Reading List

Curated by Mouhssine Rifaki | Stanford Electrical Engineering | Last updated August 2026

Score-based generative models applied to sequential decision making, planning, and policy representation.

Diffusion Models for Decision Making: 10 key papers

1. Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesis
   Janner et al. arXiv 2022.
2. Is Conditional Generative Modeling all you need for Decision-Making?
   Ajay et al. arXiv 2022.
3. Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion
   Chi et al. arXiv 2023.
4. Diffusion Models for Reinforcement Learning: A Survey
   Zhu et al. arXiv 2023.
5. AdaptDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Adaptive Self-evolving Planners
   Liang et al. arXiv 2023.
6. Offline Reinforcement Learning via High-Fidelity Generative Behavior Modeling
   Chen et al. arXiv 2022.
7. Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models
   Pearce et al. arXiv 2023.
8. MetaDiffuser: Diffusion Model as Conditional Planner for Offline Meta-RL
   Ni et al. arXiv 2023.
9. Efficient Diffusion Policies for Offline Reinforcement Learning
   Kang et al. arXiv 2023.
10. Consistency Models as a Rich and Efficient Policy Class for Reinforcement Learning
    Ding and Jin. arXiv 2023.

Related reading lists

• Transformers for Sequential Decision Making
• Diffusion Models & Score-Based Generative Models
• Score-Based Generative Modeling
• Generative Modeling
• Off-Policy Evaluation & Offline Evaluation
• Linear MDPs & Linear Function Approximation
• Robust & Risk-Sensitive RL
• Flow Matching & Schrödinger Bridges