MeanFlowAdvantage: Stable Reward Fine-Tuning for Few-Step Average-Velocity Generators

Aligning generative flow models on continuous spaces via online reinforcement learning is constrained by intractable trajectory likelihoods. Existing density-approximated policy gradient methods rely on stochastic SDE samplers to construct tractable transition kernels, which introduce training-inference inconsistencies and necessitates Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG). While implicit frameworks such as DiffusionNFT directly optimize forward-process velocity fields, its heuristic fixed-magnitude corrections prevent optimization strength from relative intra-group quality. We propose \textit{Flow Advantage-Weighted Rectification} (\textbf{FlowAWR}), a paradigm that recasts continuous generative policy optimization as supervised regression toward a theoretically optimal velocity field. Starting from the optimal policy of a KL-constrained reward maximization, FlowAWR derives the optimal velocity field that admits a magnitude-aware, advantage-weighted rectification form, yielding SDE-free optimization and CFG-free generation. In comparative evaluations on SD3.5-Medium, FlowAWR achieves improved alignment performance alongside a 2$\times$ to 5$\times$ convergence acceleration over DiffusionNFT (e.g., reaching a 24.12 PickScore in 1.2k steps, versus 23.82 in 2.0k steps for DiffusionNFT and 23.50 in $>$4k steps for FlowGRPO). Under multi-reward constraints, FlowAWR sustains generation quality, satisfying structural rules while maintaining stable out-of-domain performance.

We present AdvantageFlow, a forward-process reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for rectified flow models. The algorithm minimizes an advantage-weighted prediction loss, which maximizes reward, regularized by the rollout policy, which convexifies the objective and makes its optimization stable. Our objective can be viewed as fitting a local reward-improving target distribution. The rollout regularization arises as a variance reduction step. We evaluate AdvantageFlow empirically on text-to-image generation with Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium and FLUX.1, and compare it to both forward- and reverse-process RL algorithms.

Diffusion and flow matching have emerged as expressive policy classes in reinforcement learning, but their reliance on multi-step denoising imposes substantial computational overhead at inference time, which is particularly problematic in online RL. MeanFlow offers a promising alternative by learning an average velocity field that maps noise to data in a single network evaluation. However, MeanFlow typically requires samples from the target distribution to construct its target velocity field, which are unavailable in online RL. We propose Score-Based One-step MeanFlow Policy Optimization (SOM), an actor-critic algorithm that resolves this by constructing the target velocity field directly from the Q-function via score estimation and a probability flow ODE, thereby concentrating probability mass on high-value modes. In the fully online RL setting, SOM achieves state-of-the-art performance on locomotion tasks with a single generation step, while substantially reducing both training and inference time compared to prior diffusion- and flow-matching-based policies.