Self-Consistent Model-based Adaptation for Visual Reinforcement Learning
Self-Consistent Model-based Adaptation for Visual Reinforcement Learning
Xinning Zhou, Chengyang Ying, Yao Feng, Hang Su, Jun Zhu
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 7191-7199.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/800
Visual reinforcement learning agents typically face serious performance declines in real-world applications caused by visual distractions. Existing methods rely on fine-tuning the policy's representations with hand-crafted augmentations. In this work, we propose Self-Consistent Model-based Adaptation (SCMA), a novel method that fosters robust adaptation without modifying the policy. By transferring cluttered observations to clean ones with a denoising model, SCMA can mitigate distractions for various policies as a plug-and-play enhancement. To optimize the denoising model in an unsupervised manner, we derive an unsupervised distribution matching objective with a theoretical analysis of its optimality. We further present a practical algorithm to optimize the objective by estimating the distribution of clean observations with a pre-trained world model. Extensive experiments on multiple visual generalization benchmarks and real robot data demonstrate that SCMA effectively boosts performance across various distractions and exhibits better sample efficiency.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Reinforcement learning
Machine Learning: ML: Model-based and model learning reinforcement learning
Machine Learning: ML: Robustness
