Compositional Average Velocity Modeling for Efficient Diffusion Offline Reinforcement Learning

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Article Summary

Diffusion-based policies have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for offline reinforcement learning, but their reliance on multi-step denoising introduces substantial computational overhead and requires backpropagation through time during training, limiting scalability and practical deployment. In this work, we propose \textbf{Instant Flow Q-Learning (InsQL)}, a single-step generative policy learning framework that retains the expressive capacity of diffusion models while eliminating iterative sampling and BPTT. InsQL builds on the flow-matching perspective of diffusion policies, but replaces marginal velocity parameterization with \emph{average-velocity} modeling and introduces a principled compositional mechanism, yielding a theoretically grounded objective that learns average velocity consistently across scales. This formulation provides a direct noise-to-action mapping and enables single-step action generation. InsQL further unifies compositional average-velocity modeling with behavior-regularized actor--critic optimization in a single framework, requiring only a single policy network and avoiding distillation, multi-stage procedures, and Jacobian computations during training. At inference time, actions are generated in a single forward pass and can be refined via value-guided candidate selection to improve performance. Extensive experiments on standard offline RL benchmarks and real-world robotic manipulation tasks show that InsQL matches or surpasses state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods while substantially reducing both training and inference time. Overall, these results establish compositional average-velocity modeling as an efficient and scalable alternative to multi-step generative policies for offline RL.

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