PrivilegedDreamer: Explicit Imagination of Privileged Information for Rapid Adaptation of Learned Policies

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Main Authors: Byrd, Morgan, Crandell, Jackson, Das, Mili, Inman, Jessica, Wright, Robert, Ha, Sehoon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Byrd, Morgan
Crandell, Jackson
Das, Mili
Inman, Jessica
Wright, Robert
Ha, Sehoon
author_facet Byrd, Morgan
Crandell, Jackson
Das, Mili
Inman, Jessica
Wright, Robert
Ha, Sehoon
contents Numerous real-world control problems involve dynamics and objectives affected by unobservable hidden parameters, ranging from autonomous driving to robotic manipulation, which cause performance degradation during sim-to-real transfer. To represent these kinds of domains, we adopt hidden-parameter Markov decision processes (HIP-MDPs), which model sequential decision problems where hidden variables parameterize transition and reward functions. Existing approaches, such as domain randomization, domain adaptation, and meta-learning, simply treat the effect of hidden parameters as additional variance and often struggle to effectively handle HIP-MDP problems, especially when the rewards are parameterized by hidden variables. We introduce Privileged-Dreamer, a model-based reinforcement learning framework that extends the existing model-based approach by incorporating an explicit parameter estimation module. PrivilegedDreamer features its novel dual recurrent architecture that explicitly estimates hidden parameters from limited historical data and enables us to condition the model, actor, and critic networks on these estimated parameters. Our empirical analysis on five diverse HIP-MDP tasks demonstrates that PrivilegedDreamer outperforms state-of-the-art model-based, model-free, and domain adaptation learning algorithms. Additionally, we conduct ablation studies to justify the inclusion of each component in the proposed architecture.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_11377
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PrivilegedDreamer: Explicit Imagination of Privileged Information for Rapid Adaptation of Learned Policies
Byrd, Morgan
Crandell, Jackson
Das, Mili
Inman, Jessica
Wright, Robert
Ha, Sehoon
Robotics
Machine Learning
Numerous real-world control problems involve dynamics and objectives affected by unobservable hidden parameters, ranging from autonomous driving to robotic manipulation, which cause performance degradation during sim-to-real transfer. To represent these kinds of domains, we adopt hidden-parameter Markov decision processes (HIP-MDPs), which model sequential decision problems where hidden variables parameterize transition and reward functions. Existing approaches, such as domain randomization, domain adaptation, and meta-learning, simply treat the effect of hidden parameters as additional variance and often struggle to effectively handle HIP-MDP problems, especially when the rewards are parameterized by hidden variables. We introduce Privileged-Dreamer, a model-based reinforcement learning framework that extends the existing model-based approach by incorporating an explicit parameter estimation module. PrivilegedDreamer features its novel dual recurrent architecture that explicitly estimates hidden parameters from limited historical data and enables us to condition the model, actor, and critic networks on these estimated parameters. Our empirical analysis on five diverse HIP-MDP tasks demonstrates that PrivilegedDreamer outperforms state-of-the-art model-based, model-free, and domain adaptation learning algorithms. Additionally, we conduct ablation studies to justify the inclusion of each component in the proposed architecture.
title PrivilegedDreamer: Explicit Imagination of Privileged Information for Rapid Adaptation of Learned Policies
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11377