Generative Policy Optimization

GenPO++:
Generative Policy Optimization with Jacobian-free Likelihood Ratios

Ke Hu1,2,* Shutong Ding1,2,* Panxin Tao1 Jingya Wang1 Ye Shi1,2,†
1 ShanghaiTech University 2 InstAdapt
{huke2024, dingsht, taopx2022}@shanghaitech.edu.cn
{wangjingya, shiye}@shanghaitech.edu.cn
* Equal contribution Corresponding author

Pipeline

GenPO++ pipeline diagram

Overview Video

Abstract

Generative policies provide expressive and multimodal action distributions, making them attractive for reinforcement learning (RL) in complex continuous-control tasks. Among them, flow-based policies are especially appealing because they generate actions through deterministic transport maps. However, applying such generative policies to likelihood-based on-policy learning remains limited by the difficulty of evaluating the probability of executed actions. Existing flow RL methods either replace the true action-density ratio with approximate surrogates, which can introduce biased updates, or recover exact likelihoods through dummy-action augmentation, which enlarges the policy space and increases computation. In this work, we propose GenPO++, a reversible generative policy optimization framework that uses history states as auxiliary memory in a high-order reversible ODE solver, yielding exact inversion without changing the original action dimension. The resulting generative policy map has a log-determinant determined only by fixed solver coefficients, enabling exact and Jacobian-free likelihood-ratio computation. This design preserves the expressiveness of generative flow policies while avoiding both action ratio bias and dummy-action overhead. We evaluate GenPO++ on large-scale simulated control, fine-tuning, and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, where it achieves competitive or superior performance over state-of-the-art on-policy RL methods, while improving training stability and computational efficiency.

Experiment Videos

Videos are ordered as in the experiments: IsaacLab benchmarks, RoboMimic fine-tuning tasks, then real-world hand manipulation.

1

IsaacLab Benchmarks

Eight simulated control tasks covering locomotion, manipulation, and whole-body control.

2

RoboMimic Fine-Tuning

Pretrained flow-matching manipulation policies fine-tuned online.

Can

Single-arm object manipulation.

Box Cleanup

Dual-arm object rearrangement.

Threading

Long-horizon precision insertion.

3

Real-World Hand Manipulation

RobotEra XHand nut-bolt manipulation across different object geometries.

Red Nut-Bolt

Real-world deployment.

Blue Nut-Bolt

Real-world deployment.

Yellow Nut-Bolt

Real-world deployment.