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Flow-Based Policy for Online Reinforcement Learning

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arxiv 2506.12811 v1 pith:JTRISRMI submitted 2025-06-15 cs.LG cs.AI

Flow-Based Policy for Online Reinforcement Learning

classification cs.LG cs.AI
keywords policylearningonlineoptimizationflowflow-basedflowrlobjective
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We present \textbf{FlowRL}, a novel framework for online reinforcement learning that integrates flow-based policy representation with Wasserstein-2-regularized optimization. We argue that in addition to training signals, enhancing the expressiveness of the policy class is crucial for the performance gains in RL. Flow-based generative models offer such potential, excelling at capturing complex, multimodal action distributions. However, their direct application in online RL is challenging due to a fundamental objective mismatch: standard flow training optimizes for static data imitation, while RL requires value-based policy optimization through a dynamic buffer, leading to difficult optimization landscapes. FlowRL first models policies via a state-dependent velocity field, generating actions through deterministic ODE integration from noise. We derive a constrained policy search objective that jointly maximizes Q through the flow policy while bounding the Wasserstein-2 distance to a behavior-optimal policy implicitly derived from the replay buffer. This formulation effectively aligns the flow optimization with the RL objective, enabling efficient and value-aware policy learning despite the complexity of the policy class. Empirical evaluations on DMControl and Humanoidbench demonstrate that FlowRL achieves competitive performance in online reinforcement learning benchmarks.

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Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Test-Time Gradient Guidance of Flow Policies in Reinforcement Learning

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    QGF performs test-time policy optimization for flow models in RL by guiding a behavior-cloned reference policy with value-function gradients, achieving strong results on high-dimensional offline RL benchmarks without ...

  2. Dual-Flow Reinforcement Learning with State-Aware Exploration

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Dual-Flow RL jointly models return distributions and multimodal policies via conditional flow matching with an added ECER for exploration, claiming SOTA results on control benchmarks.

  3. Model-Based Proactive Cost Generation for Learning Safe Policies Offline with Limited Violation Data

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    PROCO generates synthetic unsafe samples via model-based rollouts and LLM-grounded costs to enable safer policy learning from offline datasets containing few or no violations.

  4. What Does Flow Matching Bring To TD Learning?

    cs.LG 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0

    Flow matching critics outperform monolithic ones in RL by 2x performance and 5x sample efficiency via test-time error recovery through integration and multi-point velocity supervision that preserves feature plasticity.

  5. ReFPO: Reflow Regularization for Flow Matching Policy Gradients

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    ReFPO adds explicit Reflow regularization to FPO, stabilizing PPO-style training and supporting high-fidelity one-step inference across GridWorld, MuJoCo, and Humanoid tasks.