Global-Local Attention Decomposition for Terrain Encoding in Humanoid Perceptive Locomotion

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Fu, Shengcheng, Zhang, Yang, Cao, Zhanxiang, Yan, Liyun, Chen, Yizhi, Yin, Yunpeng, Gao, Yue
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Fu, Shengcheng
Zhang, Yang
Cao, Zhanxiang
Yan, Liyun
Chen, Yizhi
Yin, Yunpeng
Gao, Yue
author_facet Fu, Shengcheng
Zhang, Yang
Cao, Zhanxiang
Yan, Liyun
Chen, Yizhi
Yin, Yunpeng
Gao, Yue
contents Although reinforcement learning has significantly advanced humanoid locomotion, perceptive policies still struggle on sparse-foothold terrain and constrained environments. Success in these scenarios requires both broad terrain awareness and precise foothold selection, two perceptual roles that conventional encoders often entangle. To address this challenge, we propose Global-Local Attention Decomposition (GLAD) for terrain encoding in humanoid locomotion. Realized by a coarse-to-fine encoder over a robot-centric elevation map, GLAD explicitly separates these objectives: a global attention branch utilizes attention pooling to summarize the surrounding terrain context, while a state-conditioned local attention branch sparsifies and encodes precise foothold-relevant geometry. This explicit attention decomposition prevents the dilution of fine-grained spatial cues while reducing training overhead. Experiments demonstrate that GLAD enables reliable locomotion over challenging gaps, stepping stones, and stairs. Furthermore, the learned policy exhibits emergent terrain-responsive behaviors, autonomously following narrow paths and avoiding obstacles under simple velocity commands without explicit navigation planners. In real-world deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot using onboard LiDAR, the proposed method achieves robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer across diverse sparse-foothold and obstacle-rich domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00637
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Global-Local Attention Decomposition for Terrain Encoding in Humanoid Perceptive Locomotion
Fu, Shengcheng
Zhang, Yang
Cao, Zhanxiang
Yan, Liyun
Chen, Yizhi
Yin, Yunpeng
Gao, Yue
Robotics
Although reinforcement learning has significantly advanced humanoid locomotion, perceptive policies still struggle on sparse-foothold terrain and constrained environments. Success in these scenarios requires both broad terrain awareness and precise foothold selection, two perceptual roles that conventional encoders often entangle. To address this challenge, we propose Global-Local Attention Decomposition (GLAD) for terrain encoding in humanoid locomotion. Realized by a coarse-to-fine encoder over a robot-centric elevation map, GLAD explicitly separates these objectives: a global attention branch utilizes attention pooling to summarize the surrounding terrain context, while a state-conditioned local attention branch sparsifies and encodes precise foothold-relevant geometry. This explicit attention decomposition prevents the dilution of fine-grained spatial cues while reducing training overhead. Experiments demonstrate that GLAD enables reliable locomotion over challenging gaps, stepping stones, and stairs. Furthermore, the learned policy exhibits emergent terrain-responsive behaviors, autonomously following narrow paths and avoiding obstacles under simple velocity commands without explicit navigation planners. In real-world deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot using onboard LiDAR, the proposed method achieves robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer across diverse sparse-foothold and obstacle-rich domains.
title Global-Local Attention Decomposition for Terrain Encoding in Humanoid Perceptive Locomotion
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00637