English

FlowAWR: Online Adaptive Flow Reinforcement via Advantage-Weighted Rectification

Machine Learning 2026-06-29 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Aligning generative flow models on continuous spaces via online reinforcement learning is constrained by intractable trajectory likelihoods. Existing density-approximated policy gradient methods rely on stochastic SDE samplers to construct tractable transition kernels, which introduce training-inference inconsistencies and necessitates Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG). While implicit frameworks such as DiffusionNFT directly optimize forward-process velocity fields, its heuristic fixed-magnitude corrections prevent optimization strength from relative intra-group quality. We propose \textit{Flow Advantage-Weighted Rectification} (\textbf{FlowAWR}), a paradigm that recasts continuous generative policy optimization as supervised regression toward a theoretically optimal velocity field. Starting from the optimal policy of a KL-constrained reward maximization, FlowAWR derives the optimal velocity field that admits a magnitude-aware, advantage-weighted rectification form, yielding SDE-free optimization and CFG-free generation. In comparative evaluations on SD3.5-Medium, FlowAWR achieves improved alignment performance alongside a 2×\times to 5×\times convergence acceleration over DiffusionNFT (e.g., reaching a 24.12 PickScore in 1.2k steps, versus 23.82 in 2.0k steps for DiffusionNFT and 23.50 in >>4k steps for FlowGRPO). Under multi-reward constraints, FlowAWR sustains generation quality, satisfying structural rules while maintaining stable out-of-domain performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.30376,
  title  = {FlowAWR: Online Adaptive Flow Reinforcement via Advantage-Weighted Rectification},
  author = {Zheming Fu and Ruizhe He and Wei Shang and Xiaoxiao Ma and Lei Wang and Chang Liu and Siming Fu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.30376},
  year   = {2026}
}