Real-Time Generative Policy via Langevin-Guided Flow Matching for Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental methodology in autonomous driving systems, where generative policies exhibit considerable potential by leveraging their ability to model complex distributions to enhance exploration. However, their inherent high inference latency severely impedes their deployment in real-time decision-making and control. To address this issue, we propose diffusion actor-critic with entropy regulator via flow matching (DACER-F) by introducing flow matching into online RL, enabling the generation of competitive actions in a single inference step. By leveraging Langevin dynamics and gradients of the Q-function, DACER-F dynamically optimizes actions from experience replay toward a target distribution that balances high Q-value information with exploratory behavior. The flow policy is then trained to efficiently learn a mapping from a simple prior distribution to this dynamic target. In complex multi-lane and intersection simulations, DACER-F outperforms baselines diffusion actor-critic with entropy regulator (DACER) and distributional soft actor-critic (DSAC), while maintaining an ultra-low inference latency. DACER-F further demonstrates its scalability on standard RL benchmark DeepMind Control Suite (DMC), achieving a score of 775.8 in the humanoid-stand task and surpassing prior methods. Collectively, these results establish DACER-F as a high-performance and computationally efficient RL algorithm.