Adversarial Dual On-Policy Distillation from Expressive Teacher
About
Learning from demonstrations in embodied control is often cast as behavioral cloning, and recent diffusion or flow-matching policies improve this paradigm by modeling multi-modal expert actions. Yet these methods remain offline supervised learners: the policy is trained only on expert states and receives no corrective signal on the states it actually visits. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers a natural remedy, but standard OPD assumes a strong fixed teacher, which is unavailable in demonstration-only control. We propose \textbf{FA-OPD}, an \emph{adversarial dual on-policy distillation} method in which a Flow Matching (FM) teacher is learned from demonstrations and co-trained with a lightweight MLP student. The teacher provides two complementary signals on student rollouts. The reward channel learns an expert-likeness objective over state-action pairs and drives online exploration through long-horizon policy optimization. The action channel supplies dense local targets at student-visited states, stabilizing exploitation. FA-OPD couples them so that reward distillation enables generalization beyond point-wise demonstrations, while action distillation keeps exploration anchored near expert-like behavior. Across six robot navigation, manipulation, and locomotion benchmarks, FA-OPD beats strong baselines and shows much stronger robustness under noisy or limited demonstrations. Source code: https://github.com/vanzll/FA-OPD.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Locomotion | Hopper (test) | Average Return3.36e+3 | 8 | |
| Locomotion | Walker2d (test) | Average Return4.16e+3 | 8 | |
| Manipulation | Hand-rotate (test) | Average Success Rate97.94 | 8 | |
| Manipulation | Fetch-pick (test) | Average Success Rate99.84 | 8 | |
| Navigation | Maze2D (test) | Average Success Rate87.31 | 8 | |
| Navigation | Ant-goal (test) | Average Success Rate82.25 | 8 |