RLMM-Flow: A Flow-based Mobile Manipulation Framework with Latent-Space Reinforcement Learning

Published July 30, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2607.26460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile manipulation requires generating whole-body action chunks that jointly satisfy goal reaching, collision avoidance, base kinematic constraints, manipulator joint limits, and trajectory smoothness. Flow-based generative policies provide an efficient paradigm for learning multimodal and temporally consistent motion priors from expert demonstrations, but imitation-only training cannot improve policy quality beyond the demonstration distribution. We propose RLMM-Flow, a flow-based mobile manipulation framework that combines expert flow-policy pretraining with latent-space reinforcement learning post-training. The framework first learns a flow policy that captures a multimodal whole-body motion prior from expert demonstrations. The pretrained flow policy is then frozen, while a latent steering network steers its initial noise toward higher-value action chunks. To stabilize high-dimensional latent optimization, we warm up an action-space critic before jointly training the latent critic and latent actor, and introduce coarse-to-fine latent steering that progressively expands control from a horizon-shared latent representation to a full-dimensional residual representation. Experiments on mobile manipulation motion-planning benchmarks show that RLMM-Flow substantially improves task success, collision avoidance, and trajectory quality over imitation-only flow policies and existing reinforcement learning post-training baselines, while preserving fast flow-based inference.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

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