arXiv:2603.17685cs.LG2026-03被引 2

用流匹配优化强化学习策略,解决探索与利用的平衡难题

Flow Matching Policy Optimization with Mirror Descent and Entropy Constraints

  • 基于常微分方程流匹配,无需模拟即可优化策略
  • 可精确计算熵并动态调节温度,提升训练稳定性
  • 在稀疏奖励任务中表现更优,适合复杂连续控制场景

在线强化学习中,如何平衡策略表达能力与探索-利用权衡是一大核心挑战。基于随机微分方程的扩散策略虽能表示复杂的多模态动作分布,但其随机反向过程导致熵不可计算(需启发式探索),且通过长去噪链计算策略梯度代价高且不稳定。本文指出,基于常微分方程的流匹配可天然解决这些问题,实现无模拟策略优化与可计算熵。基于此,提出流匹配策略优化框架FMER:第一,理论证明最小化优势加权条件流匹配损失等价于无模拟的策略镜面下降;第二,推导出解析熵目标,校正tanh映射带来的密度畸变,支持最优熵优化;第三,根据有效样本数动态调整镜面下降温度,确保训练过程稳健的信任区域。实验表明,FMER在具有挑战性的稀疏奖励FrankaKitchen环境中性能更优,同时在标准密集奖励MuJoCo基准上保持竞争力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Balancing policy expressiveness with the exploration-exploitation trade-off is a core challenge in online Reinforcement Learning (RL). While Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE)-based diffusion policies can represent complex, multimodal action distributions, they suffer from two critical limitations: their stochastic reverse processes render entropy intractable (necessitating heuristic exploration), and computing policy gradients through long denoising chains is expensive and unstable. In this work, we show that ODE-based flow matching inherently resolves these issues by enabling both simulation-free policy optimization and tractable entropy computation. Building on this, we introduce Flow Matching Policy Optimization with Mirror Descent and Entropy Constraints (FMER). Our framework exploits this insight in three ways. First, we theoretically establish that minimizing an advantage-weighted conditional flow matching loss acts as a simulation-free surrogate for policy mirror descent. This steers the velocity field toward high-value regions while entirely avoiding backpropagation through the ODE solver. Second, we derive an analytic entropy objective that corrects for the density distortion caused by the $\tanh$ transformation (mapping an unbounded latent space to bounded actions), thereby facilitating principled maximum-entropy optimization. Finally, we dynamically tune the mirror descent temperature based on the effective sample size to enforce a robust trust region during training. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FMER achieves superior performance on the challenging sparse-reward FrankaKitchen environment, while maintaining competitive results across standard dense-reward MuJoCo benchmarks.

强化学习流匹配策略优化熵约束

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