Fisher Decorator: Refining Flow Policy via A Local Transport Map

arXiv cs.RO / 4/21/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper targets limitations of existing flow-based offline reinforcement learning policies, which can mis-handle the relationship between L2 regularization and the 2-Wasserstein distance in offline settings.
  • It reframes policy refinement geometrically by treating the update as applying a local transport map (an initial flow policy plus a residual displacement) to correct optimization direction.
  • By studying how the policy-induced density transforms, the authors derive a local quadratic approximation of a KL-constrained objective using the Fisher information matrix, yielding an anisotropic (direction-aware) optimization problem.
  • The method uses the score function embedded in the flow velocity to form a corresponding quadratic constraint, enabling efficient optimization.
  • Experiments on multiple offline RL benchmarks show state-of-the-art performance, and the theory explains that prior methods’ suboptimality comes from their isotropic approximations.

Abstract

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.