mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

OP-GRPO: Efficient Off-Policy GRPO for Flow-Matching Models

arXiv 2604.04142 ↗First posted 5 Apr 2026cs.CVcited by 7

On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion and flow policies for robotics

Abstract (arXiv)

Post training via GRPO has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in improving the generation quality of flow-matching models. However, GRPO suffers from inherently low sample efficiency due to its on-policy training paradigm. To address this limitation, we present OP-GRPO, the first Off-Policy GRPO framework tailored for flow-matching models. First, we actively select high-quality trajectories and adaptively incorporate them into a replay buffer for reuse in subsequent training iterations. Second, to mitigate the distribution shift introduced by off-policy samples, we propose a sequence-level importance sampling correction that preserves the integrity of GRPO's clipping mechanism while ensuring stable policy updates. Third, we theoretically and empirically show that late denoising steps yield ill-conditioned off-policy ratios, and mitigate this by truncating trajectories at late steps. Across image and video generation benchmarks, OP-GRPO achieves comparable or superior performance to Flow-GRPO with only 34.2% of the training steps on average, yielding substantial gains in training efficiency while maintaining generation quality.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 39 of its 44 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2026.

Builds on

39 of 44 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025GRPO-Guard: Mitigating Implicit Over-Optimization in Flow Matching via Regulated Clipping25 Oct
  2. 2025BranchGRPO: Stable and Efficient GRPO with Structured Branching in Diffusion Models7 Sep
  3. 2025MixGRPO: Unlocking Flow-based GRPO Efficiency with Mixed ODE-SDE29 Jul
  4. 2025DanceGRPO: Unleashing GRPO on Visual Generation12 May
  5. 2025Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL8 May
  6. 2023Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimization21 Nov
  7. 2023Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning22 May

Other references · 32

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  2. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  3. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  4. 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 8,964
  5. 2015Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamicscited by 7,005
  6. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,426
  7. 2018Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actorcited by 4,635
  8. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,094
  9. 2018Neural Ordinary Differential Equationscited by 3,733
  10. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,550
  11. 2013Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 3,211
  12. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,536
20 more
  1. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 1,980
  2. 2025FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Spacecited by 960
  3. 2023Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 950
  4. 2023GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignmentcited by 946
  5. 2023Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 847
  6. 2023PyTorch FSDP: Experiences on Scaling Fully Sharded Data Parallelcited by 641
  7. 2023T2I-CompBench++: An Enhanced and Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Generationcited by 253
  8. 2023Cal-QL: Calibrated Offline RL Pre-Training for Efficient Online Fine-Tuningcited by 230
  9. 2023TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painterscited by 223
  10. 2025Unified Reward Model for Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 194
  11. 2022Hybrid RL: Using Both Offline and Online Data Can Make RL Efficientcited by 158
  12. 2025Open-Sora 2.0: Training a Commercial-Level Video Generation Model in 200kcited by 157
  13. 2025Teaching Large Language Models to Regress Accurate Image Quality Scores using Score Distributioncited by 139
  14. 2024Text-to-Image Rectified Flow as Plug-and-Play Priorscited by 38
  15. 2025RePO: Replay-Enhanced Policy Optimizationcited by 36
  16. 2025Fine-Grained GRPO for Precise Preference Alignment in Flow Modelscited by 21
  17. 2025Neighbor GRPO: Contrastive ODE Policy Optimization Aligns Flow Modelscited by 16
  18. 2025Squeeze the Soaked Sponge: Efficient Off-policy Reinforcement Finetuning for Large Language Modelcited by 14
  19. 2025Kandinsky 5.0: A Family of Foundation Models for Image and Video Generationcited by 10
  20. 2026Buffer Matters: Unleashing the Power of Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning in Large Language Model Reasoningcited by 8

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.

7 papers.

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Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Smart-GRPO: Smartly Sampling Noise for Efficient RL of Flow-Matching Models
  2. 2026Stepwise Credit Assignment for GRPO on Flow-Matching Models
  3. 2026Faster and Better Alignment for Flow Matching Models via Step-aware Advantages
  4. 2025TempFlow-GRPO: When Timing Matters for GRPO in Flow Models
  5. 2026TAGRPO: Boosting GRPO on Image-to-Video Generation with Direct Trajectory Alignment
  6. 2026Flow-DPPO: Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization for Flow Matching Models
  7. 2026Advances in GRPO for Generation Models: A Survey
  8. 2025Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization