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Related papers: What Does Flow Matching Bring To TD Learning?

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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

Flow matching policies learn continuous velocity fields that transport noise to actions, enabling fast deterministic inference for robot manipulation. However, standard training optimizes a pointwise velocity objective while inference…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Riad Ahmed , Sujosh Nag , Moniruzzaman Akash , Mostafa Hussein , Momotaz Begum

Reinforcement Learning (RL) of robotic manipulation skills, despite its impressive successes, stands to benefit from incorporating domain knowledge from control theory. One of the most important properties that is of interest is control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Shahbaz Abdul Khader , Hang Yin , Pietro Falco , Danica Kragic

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

Diffusion models can learn rich representations during data generation, showing potential for Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), but they face a trade-off between generative quality and discriminative performance. Their iterative sampling also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Kosuke Ukita , Tsuyoshi Okita

Many reinforcement learning approaches rely on temporal-difference (TD) learning to learn a critic. However, TD-learning updates can be high variance. Here, we introduce a model-based RL framework, Taylor TD, which reduces this variance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Michele Garibbo , Maxime Robeyns , Laurence Aitchison

In reinforcement learning (RL), the consideration of multivariate reward signals has led to fundamental advancements in multi-objective decision-making, transfer learning, and representation learning. This work introduces the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Harley Wiltzer , Jesse Farebrother , Arthur Gretton , Mark Rowland

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has recently been proposed as a methodology to discover complex Active Flow Control (AFC) strategies [Rabault, J., Kuchta, M., Jensen, A., Reglade, U., & Cerardi, N. (2019): "Artificial neural networks…

Computational Physics · Physics 2019-10-23 Jean Rabault , Alexander Kuhnle

Flow matching has emerged as a simulation-free alternative to diffusion-based generative modeling, producing samples by solving an ODE whose time-dependent velocity field is learned along an interpolation between a simple source…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-10 Shivam Kumar , Yixin Wang , Lizhen Lin

Given a dataset on actions and resulting long-term rewards, a direct estimation approach fits value functions that minimize prediction error on the training data. Temporal difference learning (TD) methods instead fit value functions by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 David Cheikhi , Daniel Russo

Expressive policies based on flow-matching have been successfully applied in reinforcement learning (RL) more recently due to their ability to model complex action distributions from offline data. These algorithms build on standard policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

We propose Flow-Anchored Noise-conditioned Q-Learning (FAN), a highly efficient and high-performing offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. Recent work has shown that expressive flow policies and distributional critics improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Sungyoung Lee , Dohyeong Kim , Eshan Balachandar , Zelal Su Mustafaoglu , Keshav Pingali

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have found success by using powerful probabilistic models, such as transformers, energy-based models, and diffusion/flow-based models. To this end, RL researchers often choose to pay the price…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Raj Ghugare , Benjamin Eysenbach

We study policy evaluation problems in multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) under a low-rank representation setting. In this setting, we are given $N$ learning tasks where the corresponding value function of these tasks lie in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yitao Bai , Sihan Zeng , Justin Romberg , Thinh T. Doan

Flow-matching policies have emerged as a powerful paradigm for generalist robotics. These models are trained to imitate an action chunk, conditioned on sensor observations and textual instructions. Often, training demonstrations are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Samuel Pfrommer , Yixiao Huang , Somayeh Sojoudi

Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Clare Lyle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney , Marta Kwiatkowska , Yarin Gal

In the past couple of years, the interest of the fluid mechanics community for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques has increased at fast pace, leading to a growing bibliography on the topic. While the capabilities of DRL to solve…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2022-11-30 Jonathan Viquerat , Philippe Meliga , Elie Hachem

Temporal information is essential to learning effective policies with Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, current state-of-the-art RL algorithms either assume that such information is given as part of the state space or, when learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Wenling Shang , Xiaofei Wang , Aravind Srinivas , Aravind Rajeswaran , Yang Gao , Pieter Abbeel , Michael Laskin

Learning-based optical flow estimation has been dominated with the pipeline of cost volume with convolutions for flow regression, which is inherently limited to local correlations and thus is hard to address the long-standing challenge of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Haofei Xu , Jing Zhang , Jianfei Cai , Hamid Rezatofighi , Dacheng Tao

Flow matching has emerged as a competitive framework for learning high-quality generative policies in robotics; however, we find that generalisation arises and saturates early along the flow trajectory, in accordance with recent findings in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Zidong Chen , Zihao Guo , Peng Wang , ThankGod Itua Egbe , Yan Lyu , Chenghao Qian