Closing the Sim2Real Performance Gap in RL

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Anand, Akhil S, Sawant, Shambhuraj, Hoffmann, Jasper, Reinhardt, Dirk, Gros, Sebastien
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917028265197568
author Anand, Akhil S
Sawant, Shambhuraj
Hoffmann, Jasper
Reinhardt, Dirk
Gros, Sebastien
author_facet Anand, Akhil S
Sawant, Shambhuraj
Hoffmann, Jasper
Reinhardt, Dirk
Gros, Sebastien
contents Sim2Real aims at training policies in high-fidelity simulation environments and effectively transferring them to the real world. Despite the developments of accurate simulators and Sim2Real RL approaches, the policies trained purely in simulation often suffer significant performance drops when deployed in real environments. This drop is referred to as the Sim2Real performance gap. Current Sim2Real RL methods optimize the simulator accuracy and variability as proxies for real-world performance. However, these metrics do not necessarily correlate with the real-world performance of the policy as established theoretically and empirically in the literature. We propose a novel framework to address this issue by directly adapting the simulator parameters based on real-world performance. We frame this problem as a bi-level RL framework: the inner-level RL trains a policy purely in simulation, and the outer-level RL adapts the simulation model and in-sim reward parameters to maximize real-world performance of the in-sim policy. We derive and validate in simple examples the mathematical tools needed to develop bi-level RL algorithms that close the Sim2Real performance gap.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_17709
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Closing the Sim2Real Performance Gap in RL
Anand, Akhil S
Sawant, Shambhuraj
Hoffmann, Jasper
Reinhardt, Dirk
Gros, Sebastien
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Sim2Real aims at training policies in high-fidelity simulation environments and effectively transferring them to the real world. Despite the developments of accurate simulators and Sim2Real RL approaches, the policies trained purely in simulation often suffer significant performance drops when deployed in real environments. This drop is referred to as the Sim2Real performance gap. Current Sim2Real RL methods optimize the simulator accuracy and variability as proxies for real-world performance. However, these metrics do not necessarily correlate with the real-world performance of the policy as established theoretically and empirically in the literature. We propose a novel framework to address this issue by directly adapting the simulator parameters based on real-world performance. We frame this problem as a bi-level RL framework: the inner-level RL trains a policy purely in simulation, and the outer-level RL adapts the simulation model and in-sim reward parameters to maximize real-world performance of the in-sim policy. We derive and validate in simple examples the mathematical tools needed to develop bi-level RL algorithms that close the Sim2Real performance gap.
title Closing the Sim2Real Performance Gap in RL
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17709