LASER: Latent Space Adjoint Matching for Support-Constrained Entropy-Regularized Offline RL

Songyuan Zhang, Oswin So, Eric Yang Yu, Matthew Cleaveland, Peter Crowley-Dolen +1

While offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy optimization from static datasets without costly online interaction, it remains bottlenecked by the risk of executing out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Recent approaches mitigate this by learning a behavior-cloning policy through flow matching and then performing RL within its constrained latent space. However, naively optimizing the latent policy can easily cause the policy to collapse into a brittle mode or exploit sharp artifacts of the learned critic. In this work, we find that entropy regularization is essential in latent-space RL for addressing these challenges. We introduce LASER, a novel offline RL algorithm that applies latent-space adjoint matching to achieve entropy-regularized latent-space RL with expressive flow policies while avoiding backpropagation through time. Through comprehensive experiments on 40 challenging OGBench tasks with varying dataset qualities, we show that LASER achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, LASER uses fixed method-specific hyperparameters across all tasks and outperforms the evaluated baselines, including those with task- and dataset-specific tuning, which highlights the…