Paper Reading AI Learner

From Suboptimal to Optimal: One-Step Latent Flow Policies for Offline Reinforcement Learning

2026-10-12 15:41:40
Shenghua Lu, Zixuan Yang, Rongxu Zhao, Bohao Qu, Jifeng Hu, Hechang Chen

Abstract

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn effective policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. Although generative models such as diffusion and flow matching enhance policy expressiveness, they typically start from uninformative Gaussian noise and generate actions through multi-step iteration, leading to high computational costs and failing to effectively leverage suboptimal trajectories in datasets. We propose MeanFlow2Better (MF2B), which reformulates offline RL as generative decision chunk optimization from current performance status to better performance status in a high-level latent decision space. MF2B maps trajectory chunks to high-level latent decision representations through an encoder, placing generation starting points within a structured decision space sculpted by behavioral data. The model learns a shared conditional mean velocity field in this space, constructing two flow mappings: from Gaussian-Induced Decision Sources toward positive behavioral decision regions, and from suboptimal decisions toward high-value decision regions. Both flow mappings complete decision refinement through one-step ODE integration over the unit time interval $\Delta t=1$, requiring neither multi-step iterative sampling nor backpropagation through time. Furthermore, we propose hierarchical chunk-level advantage to guide the flow direction toward high-return regions, where the high-level decisions cover multiple low-level actions, leading to sequence length compression from $T$ to $K \approx T/H$ and significantly lower computational overhead. On the D4RL Gym-MuJoCo benchmark, MF2B achieves an average score of 90.91, matching or surpassing strong baselines.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16984

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.16984.pdf


Tags
3D Action Action_Localization Action_Recognition Activity Adversarial Agent Attention Autonomous Bert Boundary_Detection Caption Chat Classification CNN Compressive_Sensing Contour Contrastive_Learning Deep_Learning Denoising Detection Dialog Diffusion Drone Dynamic_Memory_Network Edge_Detection Embedding Embodied Emotion Enhancement Face Face_Detection Face_Recognition Facial_Landmark Few-Shot Gait_Recognition GAN Gaze_Estimation Gesture Gradient_Descent Handwriting Human_Parsing Image_Caption Image_Classification Image_Compression Image_Enhancement Image_Generation Image_Matting Image_Retrieval Inference Inpainting Intelligent_Chip Knowledge Knowledge_Graph Language_Model LLM Matching Medical Memory_Networks Multi_Modal Multi_Task NAS NMT Object_Detection Object_Tracking OCR Ontology Optical_Character Optical_Flow Optimization Person_Re-identification Point_Cloud Portrait_Generation Pose Pose_Estimation Prediction QA Quantitative Quantitative_Finance Quantization Re-identification Recognition Recommendation Reconstruction Regularization Reinforcement_Learning Relation Relation_Extraction Represenation Represenation_Learning Restoration Review RNN Robot Salient Scene_Classification Scene_Generation Scene_Parsing Scene_Text Segmentation Self-Supervised Semantic_Instance_Segmentation Semantic_Segmentation Semi_Global Semi_Supervised Sence_graph Sentiment Sentiment_Classification Sketch SLAM Sparse Speech Speech_Recognition Style_Transfer Summarization Super_Resolution Surveillance Survey Text_Classification Text_Generation Time_Series Tracking Transfer_Learning Transformer Unsupervised Video_Caption Video_Classification Video_Indexing Video_Prediction Video_Retrieval Visual_Relation VQA Weakly_Supervised Zero-Shot