ReBRAC-v2: The Return of the King

We propose Flow-Anchored Noise-conditioned Q-Learning (FAN), a highly efficient and high-performing offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. Recent work has shown that expressive flow policies and distributional critics improve offline RL performance, but at a high computational cost. Specifically, flow policies require iterative sampling to produce a single action, and distributional critics require computation over multiple samples (e.g., quantiles) to estimate value. To address these inefficiencies while maintaining high performance, we introduce FAN. Our method employs a behavior regularization technique that uses a single flow policy iteration and requires a single Gaussian noise sample for distributional critics. Our theoretical analysis of convergence and performance bounds demonstrates that these simplifications not only improve efficiency but also lead to superior task performance. Experiments on robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks demonstrate that FAN achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing both training and inference runtimes. We release our code at https://github.com/brianlsy98/FAN.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) typically trains a critic by minimizing a regression loss against bootstrapped value targets stabilized by target networks with exponential moving average (EMA) updates. Multi-step targets incorporate behavior-policy actions and therefore require off-policy correction. We instead impose in-sample Bellman optimality on the critic through inequality constraints. We formulate the Lifted Bellman Linear Program (LBLP), which lifts the linear programming characterization of Bellman optimality to the joint $(Q,V)$ space so that every constraint involves only state-action pairs in the dataset. Its unique minimizer is the in-sample optimal pair, and constraints along $K$-step segments of dataset trajectories leave this minimizer unchanged for any rollout policy and horizon. Under deterministic dynamics, this minimizer lies between the best dataset return and the optimal value. Relaxing the constraints into hinge penalties recovers the same solution above a finite penalty coefficient in the tabular case. Approximate Lifted Bellman Unconstrained Minimization (ALBUM) implements this relaxation with neural networks and detaches the $K$-step rollout targets by stop gradient. Its objective contains no squared regression onto bootstrapped targets, so it can be trained without target networks or EMA updates. Under deterministic dynamics, the LBLP solution is a stationary point of the detached update under a coefficient condition independent of $γ$ and $K$, and the inequality constraints allow discounted returns along dataset trajectories to serve as lower bounds without off-policy correction or action chunking. On OGBench, ALBUM uses a single critic with a Gaussian policy, matches the average performance of FQL, and is comparable to recent action-chunking methods, while using the fewest parameters and the least peak GPU memory among all compared methods.

Neural networks applied to sequential decision-making tasks typically rely on latent representations of environment states. While environment dynamics dictate how semantic states evolve, the corresponding latent transitions are usually left implicit, creating a potential misalignment between the two. We propose to model latent dynamics explicitly by drawing an analogy between Markov decision process (MDP) trajectories and ordinary differential equation (ODE) flows: in both cases, the current state fully determines its successors. Building on this view, we introduce a neural ODE-based regularization method that enforces latent embeddings to follow consistent ODE flows, thereby aligning representation learning with environment dynamics. Although broadly applicable to deep learning agents, we demonstrate its effectiveness in reinforcement learning by integrating it into Actor-Critic algorithms. Our approach yields major performance gains across various standard Atari benchmarks for A2C and gridworld environments for PPO.