fix(policies): support offline batch inference for ACT and Diffusion

- Guard ACT's KL divergence computation against None latent params to
prevent crashes during eval when use_vae is set but the forward path
returns no VAE outputs.
- Add offline batch fallback to Diffusion's predict_action_chunk() so
it works with dataloader batches (empty queues) in addition to the
existing online rollout path (populated queues). This enables batched
action prediction for offline evaluation.

src/lerobot/policies/act/modeling_act.py

@@ -148,7 +148,7 @@ class ACTPolicy(PreTrainedPolicy):
         l1_loss = (abs_err * valid_mask).sum() / num_valid.clamp_min(1)
 
         loss_dict = {"l1_loss": l1_loss.item()}
-        if self.config.use_vae:
+        if self.config.use_vae and log_sigma_x2_hat is not None:
             # Calculate Dₖₗ(latent_pdf || standard_normal). Note: After computing the KL-divergence for
             # each dimension independently, we sum over the latent dimension to get the total
             # KL-divergence per batch element, then take the mean over the batch.

src/lerobot/policies/diffusion/modeling_diffusion.py

@@ -101,11 +101,23 @@ class DiffusionPolicy(PreTrainedPolicy):
 
     @torch.no_grad()
     def predict_action_chunk(self, batch: dict[str, Tensor], noise: Tensor | None = None) -> Tensor:
-        """Predict a chunk of actions given environment observations."""
+        """Predict a chunk of actions given environment observations.
-        # stack n latest observations from the queue
-        batch = {k: torch.stack(list(self._queues[k]), dim=1) for k in batch if k in self._queues}
-        actions = self.diffusion.generate_actions(batch, noise=noise)
 
+        Supports two modes:
+        - Online (queues populated via select_action): stacks observations from internal queues.
+        - Offline (empty queues, e.g. dataloader batch): uses the batch directly.
+        """
+        queues_populated = any(len(q) > 0 for q in self._queues.values())
+        if queues_populated:
+            batch = {k: torch.stack(list(self._queues[k]), dim=1) for k in batch if k in self._queues}
+        else:
+            batch = dict(batch)
+            if self.config.image_features:
+                for key in self.config.image_features:
+                    if batch[key].ndim == 4:
+                        batch[key] = batch[key].unsqueeze(1)
+                batch[OBS_IMAGES] = torch.stack([batch[key] for key in self.config.image_features], dim=-4)
+        actions = self.diffusion.generate_actions(batch, noise=noise)
         return actions
 
     @torch.no_grad()