RoboFFT: Finetuning generative robot policy via online reinforcement learning with forward process

arXiv:2609.32236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models, such as diffusion and flow-based models, have shown strong promise for robot policy learning by capturing complex and multimodal action distributions from demonstrations. However, policies trained solely with imitation learning often suffer from imperfect demonstrations and distributional shifts, while further improvement typically requires additional expert data. Reinforcement learning offers a natural solution through environment interaction, but effectively finetuning generative robot policies remains challenging due to the intractability of likelihood estimation. In this work, we propose RoboFFT, a forward-process reinforcement learning framework for finetuning generative robot policies, which applies forward noising to sampled actions and uses the weighted score / flow matching loss to construct a surrogate policy ratio for PPO-style updates. We evaluate RoboFFT with popular generative robot policies on representative simulation benchmarks, including long-horizon planning and sparse reward settings. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate that RoboFFT consistently improves performance while achieving better stability and training efficiency. We further integrate RoboFFT into a real world RL framework and demonstrate its effectiveness in real world tasks. Project website: https://student-of-holmes.github.io/RoboFFT/.

Abstract:Generative models, such as diffusion and flow-based models, have shown strong promise for robot policy learning by capturing complex and multimodal action distributions from demonstrations. However, policies trained solely with imitation learning often suffer from imperfect demonstrations and distributional shifts, while further improvement typically requires additional expert data. Reinforcement learning offers a natural solution through environment interaction, but effectively finetuning generative robot policies remains challenging due to the intractability of likelihood estimation. In this work, we propose RoboFFT, a forward-process reinforcement learning framework for finetuning generative robot policies, which applies forward noising to sampled actions and uses the weighted score / flow matching loss to construct a surrogate policy ratio for PPO-style updates. We evaluate RoboFFT with popular generative robot policies on representative simulation benchmarks, including long-horizon planning and sparse reward settings. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate that RoboFFT consistently improves performance while achieving better stability and training efficiency. We further integrate RoboFFT into a real world RL framework and demonstrate its effectiveness in real world tasks. Project website: this https URL.

Accepted by CoRL2026. Project Website: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.32236 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.32236v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.32236 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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RoboFFT: Finetuning generative robot policy via online reinforcement learning with forward process

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