Self-Predictive Representations for Combinatorial Generalization in Behavioral Cloning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lawson, Daniel, Hugessen, Adriana, Cloutier, Charlotte, Berseth, Glen, Khetarpal, Khimya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911604967211008
author Lawson, Daniel
Hugessen, Adriana
Cloutier, Charlotte
Berseth, Glen
Khetarpal, Khimya
author_facet Lawson, Daniel
Hugessen, Adriana
Cloutier, Charlotte
Berseth, Glen
Khetarpal, Khimya
contents While goal-conditioned behavior cloning (GCBC) methods can perform well on in-distribution training tasks, they do not necessarily generalize zero-shot to tasks that require conditioning on novel state-goal pairs, i.e. combinatorial generalization. In part, this limitation can be attributed to a lack of temporal consistency in the state representation learned by BC; if temporally correlated states are properly encoded to similar latent representations, then the out-of-distribution gap for novel state-goal pairs would be reduced. We formalize this notion by demonstrating how encouraging long-range temporal consistency via successor representations (SR) can facilitate generalization. We then propose a simple yet effective representation learning objective, $\text{BYOL-}γ$ for GCBC, which theoretically approximates the successor representation in the finite MDP case through self-predictive representations, and achieves competitive empirical performance across a suite of challenging tasks requiring combinatorial generalization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10137
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-Predictive Representations for Combinatorial Generalization in Behavioral Cloning
Lawson, Daniel
Hugessen, Adriana
Cloutier, Charlotte
Berseth, Glen
Khetarpal, Khimya
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
While goal-conditioned behavior cloning (GCBC) methods can perform well on in-distribution training tasks, they do not necessarily generalize zero-shot to tasks that require conditioning on novel state-goal pairs, i.e. combinatorial generalization. In part, this limitation can be attributed to a lack of temporal consistency in the state representation learned by BC; if temporally correlated states are properly encoded to similar latent representations, then the out-of-distribution gap for novel state-goal pairs would be reduced. We formalize this notion by demonstrating how encouraging long-range temporal consistency via successor representations (SR) can facilitate generalization. We then propose a simple yet effective representation learning objective, $\text{BYOL-}γ$ for GCBC, which theoretically approximates the successor representation in the finite MDP case through self-predictive representations, and achieves competitive empirical performance across a suite of challenging tasks requiring combinatorial generalization.
title Self-Predictive Representations for Combinatorial Generalization in Behavioral Cloning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10137