Papers › Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL

Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL

8 May 2025arXiv:2505.05470archive 2025-07-28

Jie Liu, Gongye Liu, Jiajun Liang, Yangguang Li, Jiaheng Liu, Xintao Wang, Pengfei Wan, Di Zhang, Wanli Ouyang

We propose Flow-GRPO, the first method integrating online reinforcement learning (RL) into flow matching models. Our approach uses two key strategies: (1) an ODE-to-SDE conversion that transforms a deterministic Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) into an equivalent Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) that matches the original model's marginal distribution at all timesteps, enabling statistical sampling for RL exploration; and (2) a Denoising Reduction strategy that reduces training denoising steps while retaining the original inference timestep number, significantly improving sampling efficiency without performance degradation. Empirically, Flow-GRPO is effective across multiple text-to-image tasks. For complex compositions, RL-tuned SD3.5 generates nearly perfect object counts, spatial relations, and fine-grained attributes, boosting GenEval accuracy from 63% to 95%. In visual text rendering, its accuracy improves from 59% to 92%, significantly enhancing text generation. Flow-GRPO also achieves substantial gains in human preference alignment. Notably, very little reward hacking occurred, meaning rewards did not increase at the cost of appreciable image quality or diversity degradation.

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Tasks

DenoisingDiversityReinforcement Learning (RL)Text GenerationText-to-Image Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Text-to-Image Generation GenEval SD3.5-Medium+Flow-GRPO Overall 0.95 #1 of 20 Archive leaderboard report

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