Extremum Flow Matching for Offline Goal Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rouxel, Quentin, Donoso, Clemente, Chen, Fei, Ivaldi, Serena, Mouret, Jean-Baptiste
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Rouxel, Quentin
Donoso, Clemente
Chen, Fei
Ivaldi, Serena
Mouret, Jean-Baptiste
author_facet Rouxel, Quentin
Donoso, Clemente
Chen, Fei
Ivaldi, Serena
Mouret, Jean-Baptiste
contents Imitation learning is a promising approach for enabling generalist capabilities in humanoid robots, but its scaling is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of high-quality expert demonstrations. This limitation can be mitigated by leveraging suboptimal, open-ended play data, often easier to collect and offering greater diversity. This work builds upon recent advances in generative modeling, specifically Flow Matching, an alternative to Diffusion models. We introduce a method for estimating the minimum or maximum of the learned distribution by leveraging the unique properties of Flow Matching, namely, deterministic transport and support for arbitrary source distributions. We apply this method to develop several goal-conditioned imitation and reinforcement learning algorithms based on Flow Matching, where policies are conditioned on both current and goal observations. We explore and compare different architectural configurations by combining core components, such as critic, planner, actor, or world model, in various ways. We evaluated our agents on the OGBench benchmark and analyzed how different demonstration behaviors during data collection affect performance in a 2D non-prehensile pushing task. Furthermore, we validated our approach on real hardware by deploying it on the Talos humanoid robot to perform complex manipulation tasks based on high-dimensional image observations, featuring a sequence of pick-and-place and articulated object manipulation in a realistic kitchen environment. Experimental videos and code are available at: https://hucebot.github.io/extremum_flow_matching_website/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19717
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Extremum Flow Matching for Offline Goal Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
Rouxel, Quentin
Donoso, Clemente
Chen, Fei
Ivaldi, Serena
Mouret, Jean-Baptiste
Robotics
Imitation learning is a promising approach for enabling generalist capabilities in humanoid robots, but its scaling is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of high-quality expert demonstrations. This limitation can be mitigated by leveraging suboptimal, open-ended play data, often easier to collect and offering greater diversity. This work builds upon recent advances in generative modeling, specifically Flow Matching, an alternative to Diffusion models. We introduce a method for estimating the minimum or maximum of the learned distribution by leveraging the unique properties of Flow Matching, namely, deterministic transport and support for arbitrary source distributions. We apply this method to develop several goal-conditioned imitation and reinforcement learning algorithms based on Flow Matching, where policies are conditioned on both current and goal observations. We explore and compare different architectural configurations by combining core components, such as critic, planner, actor, or world model, in various ways. We evaluated our agents on the OGBench benchmark and analyzed how different demonstration behaviors during data collection affect performance in a 2D non-prehensile pushing task. Furthermore, we validated our approach on real hardware by deploying it on the Talos humanoid robot to perform complex manipulation tasks based on high-dimensional image observations, featuring a sequence of pick-and-place and articulated object manipulation in a realistic kitchen environment. Experimental videos and code are available at: https://hucebot.github.io/extremum_flow_matching_website/
title Extremum Flow Matching for Offline Goal Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19717