mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Fisher Decorator: Refining Flow Policy via a Local Transport Map

arXiv 2604.17919 ↗First posted 20 Apr 2026cs.LG cs.ROcited by 1

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

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in flow-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong performance by parameterizing policies via flow matching. However, they still face critical trade-offs among expressiveness, optimality, and efficiency. In particular, existing flow policies interpret the L2 regularization as an upper bound of the 2-Wasserstein distance (W2), which can be problematic in offline settings. This issue stems from a fundamental geometric mismatch: the behavioral policy manifold is inherently anisotropic, whereas the L2 (or upper bound of W2) regularization is isotropic and density-insensitive, leading to systematically misaligned optimization directions. To address this, we revisit offline RL from a geometric perspective and show that policy refinement can be formulated as a local transport map: an initial flow policy augmented by a residual displacement. By analyzing the induced density transformation, we derive a local quadratic approximation of the KL-constrained objective governed by the Fisher information matrix, enabling a tractable anisotropic optimization formulation. By leveraging the score function embedded in the flow velocity, we obtain a corresponding quadratic constraint for efficient optimization. Our results reveal that the optimality gap in prior methods arises from their isotropic approximation. In contrast, our framework achieves a controllable approximation error within a provable neighborhood of the optimal solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across diverse offline RL benchmarks. See project page: https://github.com/ARC0127/Fisher-Decorator.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper 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 61 of its 77 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2026.

Builds on

61 of 77 references.

Closest ancestors · 14

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026DeFlow: Decoupling Manifold Modeling and Value Maximization for Offline Policy Extraction15 Jan
  2. 2025Expressive Value Learning for Scalable Offline Reinforcement Learning9 Oct
  3. 2025One-Step Flow Q-Learning: Addressing the Diffusion Policy Bottleneck in Offline Reinforcement Learning19 Aug
  4. 2025Energy-Weighted Flow Matching for Offline Reinforcement Learning6 Mar
  5. 2025Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion Policy17 Feb
  6. 2025Efficient Online Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Policy1 Feb
  7. 2024Diffusion-based Reinforcement Learning via Q-weighted Variational Policy Optimization25 May
  8. 2023Score Regularized Policy Optimization through Diffusion Behavior11 Oct
  9. 2023Consistency Models as a Rich and Efficient Policy Class for Reinforcement Learning29 Sep
  10. 2023Reasoning with Latent Diffusion in Offline Reinforcement Learning12 Sep
  11. 2023Efficient Diffusion Policies for Offline Reinforcement Learning31 May
  12. 2023Contrastive Energy Prediction for Exact Energy-Guided Diffusion Sampling in Offline Reinforcement Learning25 Apr
2 more
  1. 2023IDQL: Implicit Q-Learning as an Actor-Critic Method with Diffusion Policies20 Apr
  2. 2022Diffusion Policies as an Expressive Policy Class for Offline Reinforcement Learning12 Aug

Other references · 47

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  3. 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 8,964
  4. 2015Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamicscited by 7,005
  5. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,426
  6. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,094
  7. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,550
  8. 2020Offline Reinforcement Learning: Tutorial, Review, and Perspectives on Open Problemscited by 1,873
  9. 2020Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,777
  10. 2021Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modelingcited by 1,528
  11. 2020D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,406
  12. 2019Normalizing Flows for Probabilistic Modeling and Inferencecited by 1,315
35 more
  1. 2021Offline Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Q-Learningcited by 1,245
  2. 2022Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesiscited by 1,023
  3. 2022Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolantscited by 964
  4. 2021A Minimalist Approach to Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 882
  5. 2023Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Modelscited by 849
  6. 2020AWAC: Accelerating Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datasetscited by 647
  7. 2021Offline Reinforcement Learning as One Big Sequence Modeling Problemcited by 636
  8. 2020MOPO: Model-based Offline Policy Optimizationcited by 630
  9. 2025Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modelingcited by 524
  10. 2023Efficient Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datacited by 332
  11. 2024Flow Matching Guide and Codecited by 291
  12. 2024Diffusion for World Modeling: Visual Details Matter in Ataricited by 285
  13. 2023Cal-QL: Calibrated Offline RL Pre-Training for Efficient Online Fine-Tuningcited by 230
  14. 2022A Survey on Offline Reinforcement Learning: Taxonomy, Review, and Open Problemscited by 228
  15. 2024OGBench: Benchmarking Offline Goal-Conditioned RLcited by 216
  16. 2021Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning via Balanced Replay and Pessimistic Q-Ensemblecited by 211
  17. 2022Hybrid RL: Using Both Offline and Online Data Can Make RL Efficientcited by 158
  18. 2018Residual Policy Learningcited by 146
  19. 2025Training Agents Inside of Scalable World Modelscited by 122
  20. 2023Revisiting the Minimalist Approach to Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 121
  21. 2022CORL: Research-oriented Deep Offline Reinforcement Learning Librarycited by 117
  22. 2023Offline RL with No OOD Actions: In-Sample Learning via Implicit Value Regularizationcited by 114
  23. 2023Extreme Q-Learning: MaxEnt RL without Entropycited by 113
  24. 2024Is Value Learning Really the Main Bottleneck in Offline RL?cited by 82
  25. 2024From Imitation to Refinement -- Residual RL for Precise Assemblycited by 80
  26. 2025Self-Improving Vision-Language-Action Models with Data Generation via Residual RLcited by 72
  27. 2024Policy Decorator: Model-Agnostic Online Refinement for Large Policy Modelcited by 60
  28. 2023Anti-Exploration by Random Network Distillationcited by 49
  29. 2023Dual RL: Unification and New Methods for Reinforcement and Imitation Learningcited by 48
  30. 2025Temporal Difference Flowscited by 20
  31. 2024D5RL: Diverse Datasets for Data-Driven Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 11
  32. 2025Safe and Stable Control via Lyapunov-Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 10
  33. 2025Nonparametric Instrumental Variable Regression with Observed Covariatescited by 4
  34. 2026ReFORM: Reflected Flows for On-support Offline RL via Noise Manipulationcited by 4
  35. 2025Towards a Unified Analysis of Neural Networks in Nonparametric Instrumental Variable Regression: Optimization and Generalizationcited by 2

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  5. 2025Composite Flow Matching for Reinforcement Learning with Shifted-Dynamics Data
  6. 2026Latent Policy Steering through One-Step Flow Policies
  7. 2026Flow Actor-Critic for Offline Reinforcement Learning
  8. 2024Rethinking Optimal Transport in Offline Reinforcement Learning