mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Adversarial Dual On-Policy Distillation from Expressive Teacher

arXiv 2605.27095 ↗First posted 26 May 2026cs.LGcited by 0

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

also in 2 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Learning from demonstrations in embodied control is often cast as behavioral cloning, and recent diffusion or flow-matching policies improve this paradigm by modeling multi-modal expert actions. Yet these methods remain offline supervised learners: the policy is trained only on expert states and receives no corrective signal on the states it actually visits. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers a natural remedy, but standard OPD assumes a strong fixed teacher, which is unavailable in demonstration-only control. We propose FA-OPD, an adversarial dual on-policy distillation method in which a Flow Matching (FM) teacher is learned from demonstrations and co-trained with a lightweight MLP student. The teacher provides two complementary signals on student rollouts. The reward channel learns an expert-likeness objective over state-action pairs and drives online exploration through long-horizon policy optimization. The action channel supplies dense local targets at student-visited states, stabilizing exploitation. FA-OPD couples them so that reward distillation enables generalization beyond point-wise demonstrations, while action distillation keeps exploration anchored near expert-like behavior. Across six robot navigation, manipulation, and locomotion benchmarks, FA-OPD beats strong baselines and shows much stronger robustness under noisy or limited demonstrations. Source code: https://github.com/vanzll/FA-OPD.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 36 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2026.

Builds on

36 of 49 references.

Closest ancestors · 17

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Flow Matching Policy Gradients28 Jul
  2. 2025ReinFlow: Fine-tuning Flow Matching Policy with Online Reinforcement Learning28 May
  3. 2025Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL8 May
  4. 2025Online Reward-Weighted Fine-Tuning of Flow Matching with Wasserstein Regularization9 Feb
  5. 2025Flow Q-Learning4 Feb
  6. 2024FlowPolicy: Enabling Fast and Robust 3D Flow-based Policy via Consistency Flow Matching for Robot Manipulation6 Dec
  7. 2024Affordance-based Robot Manipulation with Flow Matching2 Sep
  8. 2024Diffusion-Reward Adversarial Imitation Learning25 May
  9. 2024Riemannian Flow Matching Policy for Robot Motion Learning15 Mar
  10. 2023Learning a Diffusion Model Policy from Rewards via Q-Score Matching18 Dec
  11. 2023DiffAIL: Diffusion Adversarial Imitation Learning11 Dec
  12. 2023NoMaD: Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Navigation and Exploration11 Oct
5 more
  1. 2023Policy Representation via Diffusion Probability Model for Reinforcement Learning22 May
  2. 2023IDQL: Implicit Q-Learning as an Actor-Critic Method with Diffusion Policies20 Apr
  3. 2023Goal-Conditioned Imitation Learning using Score-based Diffusion Policies5 Apr
  4. 2023Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models25 Jan
  5. 2022Diffusion Policies as an Expressive Policy Class for Offline Reinforcement Learning12 Aug

Other references · 19

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  2. 2015Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Networkcited by 10,324
  3. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  4. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,181
  5. 2024HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Modelscited by 1,660
  6. 2016Generative Adversarial Imitation Learningcited by 1,597
  7. 2020D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,427
  8. 2018Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning without Explorationcited by 1,241
  9. 2026DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligencecited by 1,040
  10. 2023On-Policy Distillation of Language Models: Learning from Self-Generated Mistakescited by 939
  11. 2018Behavioral Cloning from Observationcited by 492
  12. 2017Learning Robust Rewards with Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learningcited by 490
7 more
  1. 2023Understanding Diffusion Objectives as the ELBO with Simple Data Augmentationcited by 304
  2. 2018Variational Discriminator Bottleneck: Improving Imitation Learning, Inverse RL, and GANs by Constraining Information Flowcited by 105
  3. 2019Wasserstein Adversarial Imitation Learningcited by 60
  4. 2024JUICER: Data-Efficient Imitation Learning for Robotic Assemblycited by 38
  5. 2025The Pitfalls of Imitation Learning when Actions are Continuouscited by 26
  6. 2024Diversifying Policy Behaviors with Extrinsic Behavioral Curiositycited by 4
  7. 2024Imitation from Diverse Behaviors: Wasserstein Quality Diversity Imitation Learning with Single-Step Archive Explorationcited by 4

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  2. 2025Enabling Off-Policy Imitation Learning with Deep Actor Critic Stabilization
  3. 2026ATOD: Annealed Turn-Aware On-Policy Distillation for Multi-Turn Agentic Tasks
  4. 2026DreOPD: Degraded-Reference Extrapolative On-Policy Distillation for Flow-matching Models
  5. 2024Efficient Imitation Learning with Conservative World Models
  6. 2026SG-OPD: Sign-Gated On-Policy Distillation via Sign-Consistency Gating and Phased Teacher Sampling
  7. 2026Demystifying On-Policy Distillation: Roles, Pathologies, and Regulations
  8. 2026Provably Efficient Policy-Reward Co-Pretraining for Adversarial Imitation Learning