Distribution Contractive Reinforcement Learning (DICE-RL) turns a pretrained behavior prior into a high-performing "pro" policy by amplifying high-success behaviors from online feedback. The framework pretrains a diffusion- or flow-based policy for broad behavioral coverage, then finetunes it with a stable, sample-efficient residual off-policy RL framework that combines selective behavior regularization with value-guided action selection. It enables mastery of complex long-horizon manipulation skills directly from high-dimensional pixel inputs.
To evaluate the finetuned RL checkpoints and pretrained BC checkpoints and to get success rates for both, use the following command from the
official repository:
The output will include the success rates for both the finetuned RL checkpoint and the pretrained BC checkpoint, as well as the gain of the finetuned RL checkpoint over the pretrained BC checkpoint.
1@article{sun2026prior,
2 title={From Prior to Pro: Efficient Skill Mastery via Distribution Contractive RL Finetuning},
3 author={Sun, Zhanyi and Song, Shuran},
4 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.10263},
5 year={2026}
6}