TD-M(PC)$^2$: Improving Temporal Difference MPC Through Policy Constraint

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lin, Haotian, Wang, Pengcheng, Schneider, Jeff, Shi, Guanya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lin, Haotian
Wang, Pengcheng
Schneider, Jeff
Shi, Guanya
author_facet Lin, Haotian
Wang, Pengcheng
Schneider, Jeff
Shi, Guanya
contents Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms that combine model-based planning and learned value/policy prior have gained significant recognition for their high data efficiency and superior performance in continuous control. However, we discover that existing methods that rely on standard SAC-style policy iteration for value learning, directly using data generated by the planner, often result in \emph{persistent value overestimation}. Through theoretical analysis and experiments, we argue that this issue is deeply rooted in the structural policy mismatch between the data generation policy that is always bootstrapped by the planner and the learned policy prior. To mitigate such a mismatch in a minimalist way, we propose a policy regularization term reducing out-of-distribution (OOD) queries, thereby improving value learning. Our method involves minimum changes on top of existing frameworks and requires no additional computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach improves performance over baselines such as TD-MPC2 by large margins, particularly in 61-DoF humanoid tasks. View qualitative results at https://darthutopian.github.io/tdmpc_square/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_03550
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TD-M(PC)$^2$: Improving Temporal Difference MPC Through Policy Constraint
Lin, Haotian
Wang, Pengcheng
Schneider, Jeff
Shi, Guanya
Machine Learning
Robotics
Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms that combine model-based planning and learned value/policy prior have gained significant recognition for their high data efficiency and superior performance in continuous control. However, we discover that existing methods that rely on standard SAC-style policy iteration for value learning, directly using data generated by the planner, often result in \emph{persistent value overestimation}. Through theoretical analysis and experiments, we argue that this issue is deeply rooted in the structural policy mismatch between the data generation policy that is always bootstrapped by the planner and the learned policy prior. To mitigate such a mismatch in a minimalist way, we propose a policy regularization term reducing out-of-distribution (OOD) queries, thereby improving value learning. Our method involves minimum changes on top of existing frameworks and requires no additional computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach improves performance over baselines such as TD-MPC2 by large margins, particularly in 61-DoF humanoid tasks. View qualitative results at https://darthutopian.github.io/tdmpc_square/.
title TD-M(PC)$^2$: Improving Temporal Difference MPC Through Policy Constraint
topic Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03550