arXiv:2603.04333cs.LGcs.AI2026-03被引 1

流匹配让强化学习价值函数更稳定高效,尤其适合在线学习场景。

What Does Flow Matching Bring To TD Learning?

  • 用积分读取值+多步速度监督,提升学习稳定性与泛化能力。
  • 性能提升2倍,样本效率提高5倍,尤其在高重放比在线学习中表现突出。
  • 适合需要持续适应新任务的在线强化学习,如机器人控制、游戏智能体。

近期研究发现,流匹配在强化学习中的标量Q值估计上效果显著,但其原理尚不明确。我们证明其成功并非源于分布强化学习,因为显式建模回报分布反而会降低性能。关键在于:利用积分过程读取值,并在积分每一步施加密集速度监督,从而通过两个机制改进TD学习。第一,测试时恢复机制使迭代积分逐步修正早期估值误差,而传统单体批评家缺乏此能力。第二,在多个插值点监督速度场,促使网络特征学习更具可塑性,能适应非平稳的TD目标,同时保留历史知识且不过拟合单一目标。我们形式化并实证验证了这些效应,在高重放比在线学习等挑战性场景下,流匹配批评家性能提升2倍,样本效率提升约5倍,且训练过程稳定。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Recent work shows that flow matching can be effective for scalar Q-value function estimation in reinforcement learning (RL), but it remains unclear why or how this approach differs from standard critics. Contrary to conventional belief, we show that their success is not explained by distributional RL, as explicitly modeling return distributions can reduce performance. Instead, we argue that the use of integration for reading out values and dense velocity supervision at each step of this integration process for training improves TD learning via two mechanisms. First, it enables robust value prediction through \emph{test-time recovery}, whereby iterative computation through integration dampens errors in early value estimates as more integration steps are performed. This recovery mechanism is absent in monolithic critics. Second, supervising the velocity field at multiple interpolant values induces more \emph{plastic} feature learning within the network, allowing critics to represent non-stationary TD targets without discarding previously learned features or overfitting to individual TD targets encountered during training. We formalize these effects and validate them empirically, showing that flow-matching critics substantially outperform monolithic critics (2$\times$ in final performance and around 5$\times$ in sample efficiency) in settings where loss of plasticity poses a challenge e.g., in high-UTD online RL problems, while remaining stable during learning.

强化学习流匹配价值函数在线学习

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