mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

ReFPO: Reflow Regularization for Flow Matching Policy Gradients

arXiv 2606.21086 ↗First posted 19 Jun 2026cs.ROcited by 0

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

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Abstract (arXiv)

We present Reflow-regularized Flow Matching Policy Gradients (ReFPO), a simple online RL method that adds explicit Reflow regularization to FPO for efficient flow-based control. We uncover a key structural property: the gradient updates in Flow Matching Policy Gradients (FPO) can be interpreted as an implicit advantage-weighted Reflow process, providing a new geometric perspective on flow-based policy gradients. Building on this insight, ReFPO introduces an explicit geometric regularizer that can be implemented with a single line of code change without incurring additional computational overhead or auxiliary distillation stages. By synergizing advantage-guided updates with path rectification, our method reduces CFM proxy-ratio spikes, stabilizes PPO-style training, and enables high-fidelity one-step inference that often matches or exceeds multi-step performance. We experimentally demonstrate that ReFPO improves average performance and discretization robustness across GridWorld, MuJoCo Playground, and high-dimensional Humanoid Control tasks, providing a scalable and stable approach for generative policies in complex physical simulations.

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 42 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2026.

Builds on

42 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 13

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025One-Step Flow Policy Mirror Descent31 Jul
  2. 2025MixGRPO: Unlocking Flow-based GRPO Efficiency with Mixed ODE-SDE29 Jul
  3. 2025Flow Matching Policy Gradients28 Jul
  4. 2025ReinFlow: Fine-tuning Flow Matching Policy with Online Reinforcement Learning28 May
  5. 2025Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL8 May
  6. 2025Energy-Weighted Flow Matching for Offline Reinforcement Learning6 Mar
  7. 2025Online Reward-Weighted Fine-Tuning of Flow Matching with Wasserstein Regularization9 Feb
  8. 2025Flow Q-Learning4 Feb
  9. 2024Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization1 Sep
  10. 2023Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning22 May
  11. 2023IDQL: Implicit Q-Learning as an Actor-Critic Method with Diffusion Policies20 Apr
  12. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar
1 more
  1. 2022Diffusion Policies as an Expressive Policy Class for Offline Reinforcement Learning12 Aug

Other references · 29

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
  2. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
  3. 2023Consistency Modelscited by 1,822
  4. 2019AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapescited by 1,236
  5. 2022Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesiscited by 1,061
  6. 2023One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillationcited by 1,019
  7. 2021Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learningcited by 998
  8. 2018DeepMind Control Suitecited by 956
  9. 2023Improving and generalizing flow-based generative models with minibatch optimal transportcited by 879
  10. 2025Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modelingcited by 561
  11. 2024One Step Diffusion via Shortcut Modelscited by 391
  12. 2020dm_control: Software and Tasks for Continuous Controlcited by 375
17 more
  1. 2023Understanding Diffusion Objectives as the ELBO with Simple Data Augmentationcited by 304
  2. 2023Perpetual Humanoid Control for Real-time Simulated Avatarscited by 218
  3. 2025Reinforcement Learning with Action Chunkingcited by 107
  4. 2024Consistency Flow Matching: Defining Straight Flows with Velocity Consistencycited by 104
  5. 2024Optimal Flow Matching: Learning Straight Trajectories in Just One Stepcited by 78
  6. 2025FastTD3: Simple, Fast, and Capable Reinforcement Learning for Humanoid Controlcited by 44
  7. 2025Flow-Based Policy for Online Reinforcement Learningcited by 37
  8. 2024SlimFlow: Training Smaller One-Step Diffusion Models with Rectified Flowcited by 30
  9. 2025Terminal Velocity Matchingcited by 20
  10. 2024FlashAudio: Rectified Flows for Fast and High-Fidelity Text-to-Audio Generationcited by 19
  11. 2025One-Step Generative Policies with Q-Learning: A Reformulation of MeanFlowcited by 18
  12. 2025TwinFlow: Realizing One-step Generation on Large Models with Self-adversarial Flowscited by 17
  13. 2025SoFlow: Solution Flow Models for One-Step Generative Modelingcited by 13
  14. 2025Adversarial Flow Modelscited by 12
  15. 2024Analyzing and Mitigating Model Collapse in Rectified Flow Modelscited by 11
  16. 2025SCoT: Unifying Consistency Models and Rectified Flows via Straight-Consistent Trajectoriescited by 7
  17. 2025Learning Straight Flows by Learning Curved Interpolantscited by 2

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  4. 2026Reparameterization Flow Policy Optimization
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  6. 2026RFPO: Rectified Flow Policy Optimization for Embodied Control
  7. 2025EfficientFlow: Efficient Equivariant Flow Policy Learning for Embodied AI
  8. 2026FlowAWR: Online Adaptive Flow Reinforcement via Advantage-Weighted Rectification