[2512.02581] Generative Online Reinforcement Learning

View a PDF of the paper titled Generative Online Reinforcement Learning, by Chubin Zhang and 9 other authors

View PDF
HTML (experimental)

Abstract:Reinforcement learning (RL) faces a persistent tension: policies that are stable to optimize (e.g., Gaussians) are often too simple to represent the multimodal action distributions required for complex control. Conversely, expressive generative policies—such as diffusion and flow matching—can be difficult to optimize in online RL due to intractable likelihoods and gradients propagating through long sampling chains. We address this tension with a key structural principle: decoupling optimization from generation. Building on this, we introduce GoRL (Generative Online Reinforcement Learning), an algorithm-agnostic framework that trains expressive policies from scratch by confining policy optimization to a tractable latent space while delegating action synthesis to a conditional generative decoder. Using a two-timescale alternating schedule and anchoring decoder refinement to a fixed prior, GoRL enables stable optimization while continuously expanding expressiveness. Empirically, GoRL consistently outperforms unimodal and generative baselines across diverse continuous-control tasks. Notably, GoRL achieves returns exceeding 870 on HopperStand, more than $3\times$ the strongest baseline; on high-dimensional humanoid tasks, it further outperforms the strongest non-GoRL baseline by over an order of magnitude. Code is available at this https URL.