让扩散策略在推理时高效利用评判器梯度,提升决策准确率。
QPILOTS: Efficient Test-Time Q-Steering for Flow Policies

- 推理时通过投影中间动作估计最终动作,再计算评判器梯度
- 在50个任务上平均成功率达90%,优于现有方法
- 适用于大模型冻结场景,适合需要高精度动作生成的机器人任务
流匹配和扩散策略能生成丰富动作,但与时序差分强化学习结合仍困难。有效策略提取需利用评判器的动作梯度,但直接反向传播多步去噪过程中的梯度易数值不稳。现有方法或丢弃梯度信息,或将策略简化为单步动作器,或反复微调去噪策略。我们提出QPILOTS,保持原策略不变,在推理时动态引导去噪过程。每一步不去在噪声中间动作上评估评判器(预测不可靠),而是先投影该状态为最终清洁动作的估计,再在此处计算评判器梯度。提出两种变体:QPILOTS-U采用快速单点近似,QPILOTS-M通过学习的辅助网络进行可微采样。在标准离线到在线强化学习基准上,QPILOTS实现最佳综合性能,50个任务平均成功率达90%。还将QPILOTS应用于大型冻结预训练视觉-语言动作(VLA)基础模型,在六个仿真操作任务中表现优于或匹配现有推理时方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Flow-matching and diffusion policies are expressive action generators, but optimizing them with temporal-difference reinforcement learning (RL) remains difficult. Effective policy extraction requires exploiting the critic's action gradient, yet directly backpropagating this signal through a multi-step denoising process can be numerically unstable. Existing methods work around this either by discarding gradient information, distilling the policy into a simpler one-step actor, or repeatedly fine-tuning the denoising policy as the critic improves. We propose QPILOTS, a method that leaves the original policy unmodified and steers the denoising process at inference time. At each denoising step, instead of evaluating the critic on the noisy intermediate action where critic predictions are unreliable, we first project that intermediate state to an estimate of the final clean action and compute the critic gradient there. We introduce two variants: QPILOTS-U uses a fast single-point approximation, while QPILOTS-M draws differentiable posterior samples via a learned auxiliary network. On a standard offline-to-online RL benchmark, QPILOTS achieves the best aggregate performance, reaching an average success rate of 90% across 50 tasks. We also apply QPILOTS to steer a large, frozen, pretrained Vision-Language Action (VLA) foundation model, outperforming or matching prior inference-time approaches across six manipulation tasks in simulation.
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