Divide, Discover, Deploy: Factorized Skill Learning with Symmetry and Style Priors

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cathomen, Rafael, Mittal, Mayank, Vlastelica, Marin, Hutter, Marco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cathomen, Rafael
Mittal, Mayank
Vlastelica, Marin
Hutter, Marco
author_facet Cathomen, Rafael
Mittal, Mayank
Vlastelica, Marin
Hutter, Marco
contents Unsupervised Skill Discovery (USD) allows agents to autonomously learn diverse behaviors without task-specific rewards. While recent USD methods have shown promise, their application to real-world robotics remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a modular USD framework to address the challenges in the safety, interpretability, and deployability of the learned skills. Our approach employs user-defined factorization of the state space to learn disentangled skill representations. It assigns different skill discovery algorithms to each factor based on the desired intrinsic reward function. To encourage structured morphology-aware skills, we introduce symmetry-based inductive biases tailored to individual factors. We also incorporate a style factor and regularization penalties to promote safe and robust behaviors. We evaluate our framework in simulation using a quadrupedal robot and demonstrate zero-shot transfer of the learned skills to real hardware. Our results show that factorization and symmetry lead to the discovery of structured human-interpretable behaviors, while the style factor and penalties enhance safety and diversity. Additionally, we show that the learned skills can be used for downstream tasks and perform on par with oracle policies trained with hand-crafted rewards.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_19953
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Divide, Discover, Deploy: Factorized Skill Learning with Symmetry and Style Priors
Cathomen, Rafael
Mittal, Mayank
Vlastelica, Marin
Hutter, Marco
Robotics
Unsupervised Skill Discovery (USD) allows agents to autonomously learn diverse behaviors without task-specific rewards. While recent USD methods have shown promise, their application to real-world robotics remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a modular USD framework to address the challenges in the safety, interpretability, and deployability of the learned skills. Our approach employs user-defined factorization of the state space to learn disentangled skill representations. It assigns different skill discovery algorithms to each factor based on the desired intrinsic reward function. To encourage structured morphology-aware skills, we introduce symmetry-based inductive biases tailored to individual factors. We also incorporate a style factor and regularization penalties to promote safe and robust behaviors. We evaluate our framework in simulation using a quadrupedal robot and demonstrate zero-shot transfer of the learned skills to real hardware. Our results show that factorization and symmetry lead to the discovery of structured human-interpretable behaviors, while the style factor and penalties enhance safety and diversity. Additionally, we show that the learned skills can be used for downstream tasks and perform on par with oracle policies trained with hand-crafted rewards.
title Divide, Discover, Deploy: Factorized Skill Learning with Symmetry and Style Priors
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19953