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Offline reinforcement learning often relies on behavior regularization that enforces policies to remain close to the dataset distribution. However, such approaches fail to distinguish between high-value and low-value actions in their…

Diffusion models, praised for their success in generative tasks, are increasingly being applied to robotics, demonstrating exceptional performance in behavior cloning. However, their slow generation process stemming from iterative denoising…

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Quanhao Li , Junqiu Yu , Kaixun Jiang , Yujie Wei , Zhen Xing , Pandeng Li , Ruihang Chu , Shiwei Zhang , Yu Liu , Zuxuan Wu

Thanks to their remarkable flexibility, diffusion models and flow models have emerged as promising candidates for policy representation. However, efficient reinforcement learning (RL) upon these policies remains a challenge due to the lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Chenxiao Gao , Edward Chen , Tianyi Chen , Bo Dai

Generative policies based on expressive model classes, such as diffusion and flow matching, are well-suited to complex control problems with highly multimodal action distributions. Their expressivity, however, comes at a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Christos Ziakas , Alessandra Russo , Avishek Joey Bose

Classifier free guidance has shown strong potential in diffusion-based reinforcement learning. However, existing methods rely on joint training of the guidance module and the diffusion model, which can be suboptimal during the early stages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Zhaoyang Chen , Cody Fleming

Language models based on discrete diffusion have attracted widespread interest for their potential to provide faster generation than autoregressive models. Despite their promise, these models typically produce samples whose quality sharply…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Chanhyuk Lee , Jaehoon Yoo , Manan Agarwal , Sheel Shah , Jerry Huang , Aditi Raghunathan , Seunghoon Hong , Nicholas M. Boffi , Jinwoo Kim

Deep reinforcement learning for high dimensional, hierarchical control tasks usually requires the use of complex neural networks as functional approximators, which can lead to inefficiency, instability and even divergence in the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Yuguang Yang

Diffusion-based world models have demonstrated strong capabilities in synthesizing realistic long-horizon trajectories for offline reinforcement learning (RL). However, many existing methods do not directly generate actions alongside states…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zongyue Li , Xiao Han , Yusong Li , Niklas Strauss , Matthias Schubert

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Lei Lv , Yunfei Li , Yu Luo , Fuchun Sun , Tao Kong , Jiafeng Xu , Xiao Ma

There is growing interest in utilizing flow-based models as decision-making policies in reinforcement learning due to their high expressive capacity. However, effectively leveraging this expressivity for value maximization remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 JaeHyeok Doo , Byeongguk Jeon , Seonghyeon Ye , Kimin Lee , Minjoon Seo

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, but extending these methods to diffusion language models (DLMs) is challenging due to intractable sequence-level likelihoods. Existing…

Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have emerged as powerful generative models with the promise of fast text generation through parallel decoding. However, realizing this potential in practice remains challenging: reducing the number of…

``Distribution shift'' is the main obstacle to the success of offline reinforcement learning. A learning policy may take actions beyond the behavior policy's knowledge, referred to as Out-of-Distribution (OOD) actions. The Q-values for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Jing Zhang , Linjiajie Fang , Kexin Shi , Wenjia Wang , Bing-Yi Jing

Few-step diffusion or flow-based generative models typically distill a velocity-predicting teacher into a student that predicts a shortcut towards denoised data. This format mismatch has led to complex distillation procedures that often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Hansheng Chen , Kai Zhang , Hao Tan , Leonidas Guibas , Gordon Wetzstein , Sai Bi

We introduce Diffusion World Model (DWM), a conditional diffusion model capable of predicting multistep future states and rewards concurrently. As opposed to traditional one-step dynamics models, DWM offers long-horizon predictions in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Zihan Ding , Amy Zhang , Yuandong Tian , Qinqing Zheng

Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Baturay Saglam , Dogan C. Cicek , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat

We propose Q-learning with Adjoint Matching (QAM), a novel TD-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that tackles a long-standing challenge in continuous-action RL: efficient optimization of an expressive diffusion or flow-matching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

Recent developments in offline reinforcement learning have uncovered the immense potential of diffusion modeling, which excels at representing heterogeneous behavior policies. However, sampling from diffusion policies is considerably slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Huayu Chen , Cheng Lu , Zhengyi Wang , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Zhiqiang Dong , Teng Pang , Rongjian Xu , Guoqiang Wu