Gaussian Distillation of Flow Policies
Flow policies are among the strongest robot controllers and are well suited to modelling multimodal action distributions. Our analysis shows that the continuous-action distributions of the studied flow policies are well approximated by Gaussians. We propose the Gaussian Action Readout (GAR), which replaces a flow policy's final layer with a Gaussian readout trained on just 0.02% of eligible states, while keeping the rest of the network frozen. It samples with one action-network pass, gives closed-form likelihoods, and achieves near-teacher task success at up to twice the inference speed.
Authors
- Ziyad Sheebaelhamd
- Claire Vernade
- Youssef Saied (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4033-6022)
- François Fleuret
Publication Details
- Journal
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Published
- 2026-10-29
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.40271
- Primary Topic
- Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
- Type
- preprint