Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction is a Strong Baseline For Behavioral Foundation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jajoo, Pranaya, Sikchi, Harshit, Agarwal, Siddhant, Zhang, Amy, Niekum, Scott, White, Martha
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Jajoo, Pranaya
Sikchi, Harshit
Agarwal, Siddhant
Zhang, Amy
Niekum, Scott
White, Martha
author_facet Jajoo, Pranaya
Sikchi, Harshit
Agarwal, Siddhant
Zhang, Amy
Niekum, Scott
White, Martha
contents Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) produce agents with the capability to adapt to any unknown reward or task. These methods, however, are only able to produce near-optimal policies for the reward functions that are in the span of some pre-existing state features, making the choice of state features crucial to the expressivity of the BFM. As a result, BFMs are trained using a variety of complex objectives and require sufficient dataset coverage, to train task-useful spanning features. In this work, we examine the question: are these complex representation learning objectives necessary for zero-shot RL? Specifically, we revisit the objective of self-supervised next-state prediction in latent space for state feature learning, but observe that such an objective alone is prone to increasing state-feature similarity, and subsequently reducing span. We propose an approach, Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction (RLDP), that adds a simple orthogonality regularization to maintain feature diversity and can match or surpass state-of-the-art complex representation learning methods for zero-shot RL. Furthermore, we empirically show that prior approaches perform poorly in low-coverage scenarios where RLDP still succeeds.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_15857
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction is a Strong Baseline For Behavioral Foundation Models
Jajoo, Pranaya
Sikchi, Harshit
Agarwal, Siddhant
Zhang, Amy
Niekum, Scott
White, Martha
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) produce agents with the capability to adapt to any unknown reward or task. These methods, however, are only able to produce near-optimal policies for the reward functions that are in the span of some pre-existing state features, making the choice of state features crucial to the expressivity of the BFM. As a result, BFMs are trained using a variety of complex objectives and require sufficient dataset coverage, to train task-useful spanning features. In this work, we examine the question: are these complex representation learning objectives necessary for zero-shot RL? Specifically, we revisit the objective of self-supervised next-state prediction in latent space for state feature learning, but observe that such an objective alone is prone to increasing state-feature similarity, and subsequently reducing span. We propose an approach, Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction (RLDP), that adds a simple orthogonality regularization to maintain feature diversity and can match or surpass state-of-the-art complex representation learning methods for zero-shot RL. Furthermore, we empirically show that prior approaches perform poorly in low-coverage scenarios where RLDP still succeeds.
title Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction is a Strong Baseline For Behavioral Foundation Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15857