Reinforcement Learning via Fixed-point Flow Matching

arXiv:2610.12848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In maximum entropy and behavior-constrained reinforcement learning (RL), the optimal policy is given by a Boltzmann distribution. Generating samples from this distribution can be challenging, as it is often complex and multimodal. While flow policies trained with flow matching provide a powerful framework for representing such distributions, they traditionally rely on access to training data, which is generally unavailable in online RL. To address this limitation, we propose fixed-point flow matching (FFM), a data-free procedure for training and fine-tuning flow policies in RL. FFM leverages the target flow identity to formulate the actor update as a fixed-point iteration, utilizing a flow-matching-style regression objective where the critic's action gradients serve as regression targets. We show that the optimal policy is a fixed point of this iteration. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that FFM effectively fine-tunes pretrained flow policies in the offline-to-online setting and enables efficient and accurate training of flow policies from scratch in online RL. These results establish fixed-point flow matching as a principled approach for learning expressive flow-based policies without requiring training data.

Related

• Flow Matching Policy Optimization with Mirror Descent and Entropy Constraints
• FM-IRL: Flow-Matching for Reward Modeling and Policy Regularization in Reinforcement Learning
• Discrete Flow Matching for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning
• FLAG: Flow Policy MaxEnt-RL by Latent Augmented Guidance

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-10-12