arXiv Machine Learning

Meta Flow Maps enable scalable reward alignment

arXiv:2601. 14430v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling generative models is computationally expensive.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

WTF?! Simulation-Free Reinforcement Learning with Wasserstein-Tilted Flow Maps

The paper introduces Wasserstein‑Tilted Flow Maps (WTF), a simulation‑free reinforcement learning method that fine‑tunes pre‑trained flow‑based generative models by adding an optimal transport regularizer derived from the model’s drift. Unlike traditional KL‑reward tilting, WTF transports individual samples toward higher reward, framing the problem as a deterministic optimal control task on the flow map. Experiments on ImageNet‑256 and text‑to‑image demonstrate that WTF achieves higher reward and comparable or better diversity while reducing training compute by up to 280×.

By Abbas Mammadov, Jerry Y. Huang, Justin Lin, Partha Kaushik, Sheel Shah, Kartik Nair, Yee Whye Teh, Nicholas M. Boffi
arXiv AI
Sep 1

CF-VLA: Efficient Coarse-to-Fine Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

CF‑VLA introduces a two‑stage coarse‑to‑fine approach for vision‑language‑action policies, replacing multi‑step sampling with a coarse initialization that constructs an action‑aware starting point and a single‑step refinement that corrects residual errors. The coarse stage learns a conditional posterior over endpoint velocity to transform Gaussian noise into a structured initialization, while the fine stage performs a fixed‑time refinement. Experiments on CALVIN and LIBERO demonstrate that CF‑VLA achieves a strong efficiency‑performance trade‑off, reducing action sampling latency by 75.4 % and achieving an 83.0 % real‑robot success rate, outperforming existing NFE=2 methods and matching or surpassing NFE=10 baselines.

By Fan Du, Feng Yan, Jianxiong Wu, Xinrun Xu, Weiye Zhang, Weinong Wang, Yu Guo, Bin Qian, Zhihai He, Fei Wang, Heng Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 10

Exploring the Design Space of Reward Backpropagation for Flow Matching

arXiv:2606. 11075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning text-to-image flow matching models with human preferences via direct reward backpropagation is sample-efficient but hampered by two well-known pathologies: activations cannot be stored across the full sampling trajectory at modern model scale, and chained Jacobian products across steps inflate the reward gradient as it travels back to early indices.

By Ruoyu Wang, Boye Niu, Xiangxin Zhou, Yushi Huang, Tongliang Liu, Chi Zhang
arXiv AI
3d ago

Fenchel Tilting: Weighted Correction for Efficient Finetuning of Generative Models

Fenchel Tilt Flow Control (FTFC) is a new method for fine‑tuning pretrained generative models to arbitrary preference functions. It decouples utility optimization from model fitting by first learning reward and density‑ratio weights on pretrained samples, then freezing these weights to adjust a diffusion or flow model in a single importance‑weighted stage. The approach supports general f‑divergence penalties, achieves exact duality for concave utilities, and demonstrates up to 20× efficiency gains while outperforming baselines on image and molecule generation tasks.

By Maksim Bobrin, Maksim Zhdanov, Dmitry Dylov
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 8

SERNF: Sample-Efficient Real-World Dexterous Policy Fine-Tuning via Action-Chunked Critics and Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2602. 09580v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world fine-tuning of dexterous manipulation policies remains challenging due to limited real-world interaction budgets and highly multimodal action distributions.

By Chenyu Yang, Denis Tarasov, Davide Liconti, Romain Guntz, Hehui Zheng, Robert K. Katzschmann
arXiv AI
2d ago

Manifold-Constrained Initial Noise Optimization for Efficient Generative Model Alignment

The paper introduces ZeNOVA, a gradient‑free method for aligning initial noise in generative models. It uses annealed soft‑value guidance, manifold‑constrained hyperspherical Langevin dynamics, and Metropolis‑Hastings jumps to address instability in black‑box reward settings. Experiments on image and video models show ZeNOVA outperforms existing zeroth‑order baselines by more stably optimizing noise toward higher rewards.

By Jinho Chang, Jong Chul Ye