IPAB Workshop - 27/02/2025

Speaker: Andreas Sochopoulos

Title: Fast Flow-based Visuomotor Policies via Conditional Optimal Transport Couplings

Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching policies have recently shown remarkable

performance in robotic applications by accurately capturing multimodal robot

trajectory distributions. However, their computationally expensive inference, due

to iterative denoising or numerical integration of an ODE, limits their application as

real-time controllers for robots. We introduce a methodology that utilizes Optimal

Transport couplings between noise and samples, in order to force straight solutions

on the Probability Flow ODE. We show that naively coupling noise and samples

does not work well in conditional tasks and introduce the condition variables in

the coupling process to enhance few-step performance. The proposed few-step

policy achieves state of the art success rates in a diverse set of simulation and

real-world robot tasks while maintaining the same training complexity as vanilla

Flow Matching, in contrast to distillation methods.