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Flow-based generative models have greatly improved text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis quality, but inference speed remains limited by the iterative sampling process and multiple function evaluations (NFE). The recent MeanFlow model accelerates…

Sound · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Wei Wang , Rong Cao , Yi Guo , Zhengyang Chen , Kuan Chen , Yuanyuan Huo

Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-19 Youbang Sun , Mahyar Fazlyab , Shahin Shahrampour

We propose Score-of-Mixture Training (SMT), a novel framework for training one-step generative models by minimizing a class of divergences called the $\alpha$-skew Jensen--Shannon divergence. At its core, SMT estimates the score of mixture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Tejas Jayashankar , J. Jon Ryu , Gregory Wornell

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

We propose a novel policy gradient method for multi-agent reinforcement learning, which leverages two different variance-reduction techniques and does not require large batches over iterations. Specifically, we propose a momentum-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Zhanhong Jiang , Xian Yeow Lee , Sin Yong Tan , Kai Liang Tan , Aditya Balu , Young M. Lee , Chinmay Hegde , Soumik Sarkar

Generative models can be categorized into two types: explicit generative models that define explicit density forms and allow exact likelihood inference, such as score-based diffusion models (SDMs) and normalizing flows; implicit generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-06 Jingwei Zhang , Han Shi , Jincheng Yu , Enze Xie , Zhenguo Li

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

The multi-step denoising process in diffusion and Flow Matching models causes major efficiency issues, which motivates research on few-step generation. We present Solution Flow Models (SoFlow), a framework for one-step generation from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Tianze Luo , Haotian Yuan , Zhuang Liu

Training expressive flow-based policies with off-policy reinforcement learning is notoriously unstable due to gradient pathologies in the multi-step action sampling process. We trace this instability to a fundamental connection: the flow…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Yixian Zhang , Shu'ang Yu , Tonghe Zhang , Mo Guang , Haojia Hui , Kaiwen Long , Yu Wang , Chao Yu , Wenbo Ding

We observe that several existing policy gradient methods (such as vanilla policy gradient, PPO, A2C) may suffer from overly large gradients when the current policy is close to deterministic (even in some very simple environments), leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanqi Li , Jian Li

We present a generative predictive control (GPC) framework that amortizes sampling-based Model Predictive Control (SPC) by bootstrapping it with conditional flow-matching models trained on SPC control sequences collected in simulation.…

Entropy regularization is a popular method in reinforcement learning (RL). Although it has many advantages, it alters the RL objective of the original Markov Decision Process (MDP). Though divergence regularization has been proposed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Kefan Su , Zongqing Lu

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a popular framework in reinforcement learning, serving as a unifying perspective that encompasses numerous algorithms. These algorithms are derived through the selection of a mirror map and enjoy finite-time…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-07 Carlo Alfano , Sebastian Towers , Silvia Sapora , Chris Lu , Patrick Rebeschini

In many practical uses of reinforcement learning (RL) the set of actions available at a given state is a random variable, with realizations governed by an exogenous stochastic process. Somewhat surprisingly, the foundations for such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Craig Boutilier , Alon Cohen , Amit Daniely , Avinatan Hassidim , Yishay Mansour , Ofer Meshi , Martin Mladenov , Dale Schuurmans

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow us to combine model-generated data with those collected from interaction with the real system in order to alleviate the data efficiency problem in RL. However, designing such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Yinlam Chow , Brandon Cui , MoonKyung Ryu , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Reinforcement learning has been proven to be highly effective in handling complex control tasks. Traditional methods typically use unimodal distributions, such as Gaussian distributions, to model the output of value distributions. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Tong Liu , Yinuo Wang , Xujie Song , Wenjun Zou , Liangfa Chen , Likun Wang , Bin Shuai , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li

We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine learning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Dinghuai Zhang , Ricky T. Q. Chen , Cheng-Hao Liu , Aaron Courville , Yoshua Bengio

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments, particularly when system parameters are unknown. This paper investigates RL-based control for entropy-regularized…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-02 Gabriel Diaz , Lucky Li , Wenhao Zhang

Mean field games (MFGs) model the limit of large populations of strategically interacting agents, yet both forward and inverse problems remain challenging. For the forward problem, a difficulty is to design numerical methods with global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-12 Hanwei Yan , Xianjin Yang , Jingguo Zhang

Diffusion models approximate the denoising distribution as a Gaussian and predict its mean, whereas flow matching models reparameterize the Gaussian mean as flow velocity. However, they underperform in few-step sampling due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Hansheng Chen , Kai Zhang , Hao Tan , Zexiang Xu , Fujun Luan , Leonidas Guibas , Gordon Wetzstein , Sai Bi