Generative Predictive Control: Flow Matching Policies for Dynamic and Difficult-to-Demonstrate Tasks

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kurtz, Vince, Burdick, Joel W.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Kurtz, Vince
Burdick, Joel W.
author_facet Kurtz, Vince
Burdick, Joel W.
contents Generative control policies have recently unlocked major progress in robotics. These methods produce action sequences via diffusion or flow matching, with training data provided by demonstrations. But existing methods come with two key limitations: they require expert demonstrations, which can be difficult to obtain, and they are limited to relatively slow, quasi-static tasks. In this paper, we leverage a tight connection between sampling-based predictive control and generative modeling to address each of these issues. In particular, we introduce generative predictive control, a supervised learning framework for tasks with fast dynamics that are easy to simulate but difficult to demonstrate. We then show how trained flow-matching policies can be warm-started at inference time, maintaining temporal consistency and enabling high-frequency feedback. We believe that generative predictive control offers a complementary approach to existing behavior cloning methods, and hope that it paves the way toward generalist policies that extend beyond quasi-static demonstration-oriented tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13406
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generative Predictive Control: Flow Matching Policies for Dynamic and Difficult-to-Demonstrate Tasks
Kurtz, Vince
Burdick, Joel W.
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Systems and Control
Generative control policies have recently unlocked major progress in robotics. These methods produce action sequences via diffusion or flow matching, with training data provided by demonstrations. But existing methods come with two key limitations: they require expert demonstrations, which can be difficult to obtain, and they are limited to relatively slow, quasi-static tasks. In this paper, we leverage a tight connection between sampling-based predictive control and generative modeling to address each of these issues. In particular, we introduce generative predictive control, a supervised learning framework for tasks with fast dynamics that are easy to simulate but difficult to demonstrate. We then show how trained flow-matching policies can be warm-started at inference time, maintaining temporal consistency and enabling high-frequency feedback. We believe that generative predictive control offers a complementary approach to existing behavior cloning methods, and hope that it paves the way toward generalist policies that extend beyond quasi-static demonstration-oriented tasks.
title Generative Predictive Control: Flow Matching Policies for Dynamic and Difficult-to-Demonstrate Tasks
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13406