Fisher Decorator: Refining Flow Policy via a Local Transport Map
About
Recent advances in flow-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong performance by parameterizing policies via flow matching. However, they still face critical trade-offs among expressiveness, optimality, and efficiency. In particular, existing flow policies interpret the $L_2$ regularization as an upper bound of the 2-Wasserstein distance ($W_2$), which can be problematic in offline settings. This issue stems from a fundamental geometric mismatch: the behavioral policy manifold is inherently anisotropic, whereas the $L_2$ (or upper bound of $W_2$) regularization is isotropic and density-insensitive, leading to systematically misaligned optimization directions. To address this, we revisit offline RL from a geometric perspective and show that policy refinement can be formulated as a local transport map: an initial flow policy augmented by a residual displacement. By analyzing the induced density transformation, we derive a local quadratic approximation of the KL-constrained objective governed by the Fisher information matrix, enabling a tractable anisotropic optimization formulation. By leveraging the score function embedded in the flow velocity, we obtain a corresponding quadratic constraint for efficient optimization. Our results reveal that the optimality gap in prior methods arises from their isotropic approximation. In contrast, our framework achieves a controllable approximation error within a provable neighborhood of the optimal solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across diverse offline RL benchmarks. See project page: https://github.com/ARC0127/Fisher-Decorator.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Navigation | OGBench antmaze-large-singletask | Score87 | 12 | |
| Navigation | OGBench humanoidmaze-medium-singletask | Score72 | 12 | |
| Navigation | D4RL AntMaze | Score87 | 12 | |
| Object Manipulation | OGBench cube-double-singletask | Score43 | 12 | |
| Puzzle Solving | OGBench puzzle-3x3-singletask | Score43 | 12 | |
| soccer | OGBench antsoccer-arena-singletask | Score64 | 12 | |
| Navigation | OGBench antmaze-giant-singletask | Score13 | 12 | |
| Navigation | OGBench humanoidmaze-large-singletask | Score8 | 12 | |
| Object Manipulation | OGBench scene-singletask | Score56 | 12 | |
| Object Manipulation | OGBench cube-single-singletask | Score94 | 12 |