用测试时梯度引导流模型策略,无需复杂训练即可提升强化学习性能。
Test-Time Gradient Guidance of Flow Policies in Reinforcement Learning

- 测试时利用价值梯度指导流策略生成更高回报动作。
- 在高维动作空间任务上超越已有测试时强化学习方法,媲美顶尖训练时算法。
- 无需训练时优化,适合大模型且稳定可扩展,适合实际部署。
表达能力强的连续控制策略,如扩散模型和流模型,是近年来模拟与真实机器人控制中模仿学习规模化进展的核心。尽管它们在监督式模仿学习中表现稳定,但将其融入强化学习(RL)以改进策略却面临挑战,常需特殊训练目标或反向传播去噪过程,导致稳定性问题并影响可扩展性。本文探讨仅在测试时采用简单策略改进方案是否能作为替代方案,保持稳定的监督训练不变。为此,提出QGF(Q-Guided Flow)算法,完全在测试时进行策略优化:先通过标准行为克隆预训练一个参考流策略和一个价值函数评击器,测试时使用价值梯度引导参考策略生成更高价值动作,无需额外策略学习。实验表明,QGF在单任务和目标条件化的离线强化学习基准上优于现有测试时强化学习方法,在高维动作空间下表现优异,且运行成本远低于主流训练时算法。同时,其性能随模型规模增长良好,避免了演员-评论家训练的不稳定性,提供了一种实用高效的基于表达性策略的强化学习方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Expressive continuous control policies, such as diffusion and flow models, form the backbone of recent advances in scaling imitation learning for simulated and real robot control. While they are known to scale stably in the supervised imitation learning setting, incorporating them into reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines for policy improvement has proven more difficult. It often requires specialized training objectives or backpropagating through denoising processes, which cause well-known issues with stability and affect scalability. In this paper we study the question of whether simple policy improvement schemes at test time alone, leaving stable supervised policy training intact, can be a competitive alternative which sidesteps these issues. To this end, we propose QGF (Q-Guided Flow), an RL algorithm that performs policy optimization entirely at test time. QGF works by pre-training both a reference flow policy (via a standard behavioral cloning objective) and a value function critic and, at test time, using the value gradient to guide the reference policy to generate higher-value actions without any additional policy learning. Empirically, QGF outperforms prior test-time RL methods on single-task and goal-conditioned offline RL benchmarks with high-dimensional action spaces, and is competitive with state-of-the-art training-time algorithms while being much cheaper to run. Moreover, it exhibits favorable scaling with model size by avoiding the instability of actor-critic training, offering a practical and effective alternative RL algorithm with expressive policies.
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