arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

An Informational Curse of Horizon in Goal-Conditioned Policy Learning

The paper identifies an informational curse of horizon in goal-conditioned policy learning, showing that longer goal relabeling horizons during training can hurt policy generalization and performance. Controlled experiments with oracle planners separate training horizons from test horizons, revealing that behavioral cloning policies degrade with longer horizons while reinforcement learning mitigates this effect. The authors attribute this to reduced conditional mutual information between actions and hindsight-relabeled goals, and demonstrate that distilling short-horizon policy Jacobians into long-horizon policies improves performance, especially in combinatorial manipulation tasks.

By John L. Zhou, Yuxuan Dong, Jonathan C. Kao
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Beyond a single latent space: a dual-latent world model for long-horizon planning

The paper introduces the Dual-Latent World Model (Dual-WM), which separates local execution and long-range planning into distinct latent spaces and dynamics models. A new learning method, Long-Horizon Representation Learning with Weighted Rollout (LoRe), supervises predictions at both levels using exponential horizon weights. Experiments on five goal-conditioned visual control tasks show that Dual-WM improves success rates over strong baselines, especially at longer horizons.

By Delin Zhao, Zhengrong Yue, Shaobin Zhuang, Junlin He, Xiaoyu Chen, Zikang Wang, Yuxin Liu, Limin Wang, Yali Wang