mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

ReFORM: Reflected Flows for On-support Offline RL via Noise Manipulation

arXiv 2602.05051 ↗First posted 4 Feb 2026cs.LG cs.AI cs.ROcited by 4

On the map: Offline RL and imitation learning from data → Diffusion and flow policies for offline RL

Abstract (arXiv)

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn the optimal policy from a fixed dataset generated by behavior policies without additional environment interactions. One common challenge that arises in this setting is the out-of-distribution (OOD) error, which occurs when the policy leaves the training distribution. Prior methods penalize a statistical distance term to keep the policy close to the behavior policy, but this constrains policy improvement and may not completely prevent OOD actions. Another challenge is that the optimal policy distribution can be multimodal and difficult to represent. Recent works apply diffusion or flow policies to address this problem, but it is unclear how to avoid OOD errors while retaining policy expressiveness. We propose ReFORM, an offline RL method based on flow policies that enforces the less restrictive support constraint by construction. ReFORM learns a behavior cloning (BC) flow policy with a bounded source distribution to capture the support of the action distribution, then optimizes a reflected flow that generates bounded noise for the BC flow while keeping the support, to maximize the performance. Across 40 challenging tasks from the OGBench benchmark with datasets of varying quality and using a constant set of hyperparameters for all tasks, ReFORM dominates all baselines with hand-tuned hyperparameters on the performance profile curves.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for offline RL, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data. Builds on 61 of its 69 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2026.

Builds on

61 of 69 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Energy-Weighted Flow Matching for Offline Reinforcement Learning6 Mar
  2. 2025Flow Q-Learning4 Feb
  3. 2024OGBench: Benchmarking Offline Goal-Conditioned RL26 Oct
  4. 2023Score Regularized Policy Optimization through Diffusion Behavior11 Oct
  5. 2023Consistency Models as a Rich and Efficient Policy Class for Reinforcement Learning29 Sep
  6. 2023IDQL: Implicit Q-Learning as an Actor-Critic Method with Diffusion Policies20 Apr
  7. 2023Goal-Conditioned Imitation Learning using Score-based Diffusion Policies5 Apr
  8. 2022Diffusion Policies as an Expressive Policy Class for Offline Reinforcement Learning12 Aug

Other references · 53

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  2. 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 8,964
  3. 2015Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamicscited by 7,005
  4. 2016Layer Normalizationcited by 5,579
  5. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,426
  6. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,550
  7. 2016Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)cited by 3,431
  8. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusioncited by 2,730
  9. 2018Addressing Function Approximation Error in Actor-Critic Methodscited by 2,302
  10. 2016Density estimation using Real NVPcited by 2,029
  11. 2020Offline Reinforcement Learning: Tutorial, Review, and Perspectives on Open Problemscited by 1,873
  12. 2020Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,777
38 more
  1. 2015Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learningcited by 1,704
  2. 2020D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,406
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  4. 2022Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolantscited by 964
  5. 2023Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learningcited by 939
  6. 2021A Minimalist Approach to Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 882
  7. 2019Stabilizing Off-Policy Q-Learning via Bootstrapping Error Reductioncited by 833
  8. 2021Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipicecited by 781
  9. 2019Advantage-Weighted Regression: Simple and Scalable Off-Policy Reinforcement Learningcited by 750
  10. 2019Behavior Regularized Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 654
  11. 2020AWAC: Accelerating Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datasetscited by 647
  12. 2025Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modelingcited by 524
  13. 2023Efficient Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datacited by 332
  14. 2019Way Off-Policy Batch Deep Reinforcement Learning of Implicit Human Preferences in Dialogcited by 283
  15. 2020Critic Regularized Regressioncited by 269
  16. 2023Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Modelscited by 260
  17. 2024Adjoint Matching: Fine-tuning Flow and Diffusion Generative Models with Memoryless Stochastic Optimal Controlcited by 222
  18. 2020Keep Doing What Worked: Behavioral Modelling Priors for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 213
  19. 2025Steering Your Diffusion Policy with Latent Space Reinforcement Learningcited by 149
  20. 2020Parrot: Data-Driven Behavioral Priors for Reinforcement Learningcited by 136
  21. 2024Fine-Tuning of Continuous-Time Diffusion Models as Entropy-Regularized Controlcited by 136
  22. 2020PLAS: Latent Action Space for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 133
  23. 2024InitNO: Boosting Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Initial Noise Optimizationcited by 123
  24. 2023Revisiting the Minimalist Approach to Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 121
  25. 2023Extreme Q-Learning: MaxEnt RL without Entropycited by 113
  26. 2022Mildly Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 112
  27. 2024Bigger, Regularized, Optimistic: scaling for compute and sample-efficient continuous controlcited by 104
  28. 2024Golden Noise for Diffusion Models: A Learning Frameworkcited by 91
  29. 2022Supported Policy Optimization for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 73
  30. 2023One-Step Diffusion Distillation via Deep Equilibrium Modelscited by 60
  31. 2024A Noise is Worth Diffusion Guidancecited by 48
  32. 2025Noise Hypernetworks: Amortizing Test-Time Compute in Diffusion Modelscited by 35
  33. 2025Scaling Offline RL via Efficient and Expressive Shortcut Modelscited by 27
  34. 2023Supported Trust Region Optimization for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 20
  35. 2025floq: Training Critics via Flow-Matching for Scaling Compute in Value-Based RLcited by 20
  36. 2023Constrained Policy Optimization with Explicit Behavior Density for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 16
  37. 2024Reflected Flow Matchingcited by 13
  38. 2024Adaptive Advantage-Guided Policy Regularization for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 13

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

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  6. 2024Out-of-Distribution Adaptation in Offline RL: Counterfactual Reasoning via Causal Normalizing Flows
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