FlowMPC: Improving Flow Matching policies with World Models
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Abstract (arXiv)
Flow Matching (FM) is a powerful approach for behavior cloning in multimodal action spaces [Jiang et al., 2025], but because it is not trained to directly maximize expected return, there is still room to improve how FM policies act at test time. This work investigates whether a learned world model can improve FM policies by enabling Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning over candidate action sequences proposed by the policy. Building on TD-MPC2 [Hansen et al., 2024], I introduce FlowMPC, a framework that combines an imitation-learned FM policy with a learned world model for test-time planning in ManiSkill manipulation tasks [Tao et al., 2025]. Across PickCube and PickSingleYCB, adding the world model improved performance over the FM policy alone, with especially clear gains in end-of-episode success. These results suggest that world-model-based planning can effectively complement flow-based imitation policies without modifying the FM training objective.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 7 of its 7 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2026.
Builds on
7 of 7 references.
References · 7
- 2018Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actorcited by 4,635
- 2022Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesiscited by 1,023
- 2023TD-MPC2: Scalable, Robust World Models for Continuous Controlcited by 482
- 2024ManiSkill3: GPU Parallelized Robotics Simulation and Rendering for Generalizable Embodied AIcited by 216
- 2025Flow Matching Policy Gradientscited by 86
- 2025Streaming Flow Policy: Simplifying diffusion/flow-matching policies by treating action trajectories as flow trajectoriescited by 34
- 2025Reinforcement Learning for Flow-Matching Policiescited by 14
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.
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- 2025FM-IRL: Flow-Matching for Reward Modeling and Policy Regularization in Reinforcement Learning
- 2026FlowDPG: Deterministic Policy Gradient on Flow Matching Policies for Real-World Manipulation
- 2025Towards Safe Imitation Learning via Potential Field-Guided Flow Matching
- 2026Flowing With Purpose: Latent Action Guided Flow Matching Policies For Robotic Manipulation
- 2025VFP: Variational Flow-Matching Policy for Multi-Modal Robot Manipulation
- 2025WorldPlanner: Monte Carlo Tree Search and MPC with Action-Conditioned Visual World Models
- 2026Flow Policies as Actions of Skill-Level World Models: Learned and Symbolic Abstractions for Long-Horizon Planning
- 2024FlowPolicy: Enabling Fast and Robust 3D Flow-based Policy via Consistency Flow Matching for Robot Manipulation