ScoRe-Flow: Complete Distributional Control via Score-Based Reinforcement Learning for Flow Matching
For robotic control, this method improves fine-tuning efficiency and performance over existing flow-based RL approaches, though it is an incremental improvement over known techniques.
ScoRe-Flow introduces a score-based RL fine-tuning method for flow matching policies that modulates drift via the score function and learns variance prediction, achieving 2.4x faster convergence on D4RL locomotion and up to 5.4% higher success rates on manipulation tasks compared to prior flow-based methods.
Flow Matching (FM) policies have emerged as an efficient backbone for robotic control, offering fast and expressive action generation that underpins recent large-scale embodied AI systems. However, FM policies trained via imitation learning inherit the limitations of demonstration data; surpassing suboptimal behaviors requires reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning. Recent methods convert deterministic flows into stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with learnable noise injection, enabling exploration and tractable likelihoods, but such noise-only control can compromise training efficiency when demonstrations already provide strong priors. We observe that modulating the drift via the score function, i.e., the gradient of log-density, steers exploration toward high-probability regions, improving stability. The score admits a closed-form expression from the velocity field, requiring no auxiliary networks. Based on this, we propose ScoRe-Flow, a score-based RL fine-tuning method that combines drift modulation with learned variance prediction to achieve decoupled control over the mean and variance of stochastic transitions. Experiments demonstrate that ScoRe-Flow achieves 2.4x faster convergence than flow-based SOTA on D4RL locomotion tasks and up to 5.4% higher success rates on Robomimic and Franka Kitchen manipulation tasks.