One-Step Flow Policy: Self-Distillation for Fast Visuomotor Policies
About
Generative flow and diffusion models provide the continuous, multimodal action distributions needed for high-precision robotic policies. However, their reliance on iterative sampling introduces severe inference latency, degrading control frequency and harming performance in time-sensitive manipulation. To address this problem, we propose the One-Step Flow Policy (OFP), a from-scratch self-distillation framework for high-fidelity, single-step action generation without a pre-trained teacher. OFP unifies a self-consistency loss to enforce coherent transport across time intervals, and a self-guided regularization to sharpen predictions toward high-density expert modes. In addition, a warm-start mechanism leverages temporal action correlations to minimize the generative transport distance. Evaluations across 56 diverse simulated manipulation tasks demonstrate that a one-step OFP achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming 100-step diffusion and flow policies while accelerating action generation by over $100\times$. We further integrate OFP into the $\pi_{0.5}$ model on RoboTwin 2.0, where one-step OFP surpasses the original 10-step policy. These results establish OFP as a practical, scalable solution for highly accurate and low-latency robot control.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Robotic Manipulation | RoboTwin 2.0 (test) | Average Success Rate94.3 | 22 | |
| 3D pointcloud manipulation | MetaWorld | Success Rate (Easy)87.9 | 17 | |
| Tool-based Manipulation | DexArt | DexArt Avg Success Rate64.3 | 11 | |
| 2D image-based manipulation | Adroit & DexArt 2D image-based manipulation | Door Success Rate68.3 | 8 | |
| 3D pointcloud manipulation | Adroit | Success Rate85 | 8 | |
| Adjust Bottle | RoboTwin 2.0 (test) | Success Rate99 | 5 | |
| Beat Block Hammer | RoboTwin 2.0 (test) | Success Rate91.7 | 5 | |
| Place empty cup | RoboTwin 2.0 (test) | Success Rate93.7 | 5 |