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Efficient Hierarchical Implicit Flow Q-learning for Offline Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2026-04-13 v1

Abstract

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is a practical reinforcement learning paradigm that aims to learn goal-conditioned policies from reward-free offline data. Despite recent advances in hierarchical architectures such as HIQL, long-horizon control in offline GCRL remains challenging due to the limited expressiveness of Gaussian policies and the inability of high-level policies to generate effective subgoals. To address these limitations, we propose the goal-conditioned mean flow policy, which introduces an average velocity field into hierarchical policy modeling for offline GCRL. Specifically, the mean flow policy captures complex target distributions for both high-level and low-level policies through a learned average velocity field, enabling efficient action generation via one-step sampling. Furthermore, considering the insufficiency of goal representation, we introduce a LeJEPA loss that repels goal representation embeddings during training, thereby encouraging more discriminative representations and improving generalization. Experimental results show that our method achieves strong performance across both state-based and pixel-based tasks in the OGBench benchmark.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.08960,
  title  = {Efficient Hierarchical Implicit Flow Q-learning for Offline Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Zhiqiang Dong and Teng Pang and Rongjian Xu and Guoqiang Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.08960},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:02:23.965Z