TAR: Teacher-Aligned Representations via Contrastive Learning for Quadrupedal Locomotion

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20839v2
• Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:09:59 GMT
• Title: TAR: Teacher-Aligned Representations via Contrastive Learning for Quadrupedal Locomotion
• Abstract summary: Quadrupedal locomotion via Reinforcement Learning (RL) is commonly addressed using the teacher-student paradigm.<n>We propose Teacher-Aligned Representations via Contrastive Learning (TAR), a framework that leverages privileged information with self-supervised contrastive learning.<n>Results showed accelerated training by 2x compared to state-of-the-art baselines to achieve peak performance.
• Score: 3.1194372040101928
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Quadrupedal locomotion via Reinforcement Learning (RL) is commonly addressed using the teacher-student paradigm, where a privileged teacher guides a proprioceptive student policy. However, key challenges such as representation misalignment between privileged teacher and proprioceptive-only student, covariate shift due to behavioral cloning, and lack of deployable adaptation; lead to poor generalization in real-world scenarios. We propose Teacher-Aligned Representations via Contrastive Learning (TAR), a framework that leverages privileged information with self-supervised contrastive learning to bridge this gap. By aligning representations to a privileged teacher in simulation via contrastive objectives, our student policy learns structured latent spaces and exhibits robust generalization to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios, surpassing the fully privileged "Teacher". Results showed accelerated training by 2x compared to state-of-the-art baselines to achieve peak performance. OOD scenarios showed better generalization by 40% on average compared to existing methods. Moreover, TAR transitions seamlessly into learning during deployment without requiring privileged states, setting a new benchmark in sample-efficient, adaptive locomotion and enabling continual fine-tuning in real-world scenarios. Open-source code and videos are available at https://amrmousa.com/TARLoco/.

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