Is It the Curriculum or Just the Easy Start? Benchmarking Unsupervised Environment Design on Quadrupeds

Title:Is It the Curriculum or Just the Easy Start? Benchmarking Unsupervised Environment Design on Quadrupeds

Abstract:Unsupervised environment design (UED) methods such as PLR, ACCEL, SFL and PAIRED are compared mostly on 2D mazes, grid worlds and BipedalWalker, while terrain curricula for legged robots are hand-designed and evaluated against a few baselines. We present a benchmark that runs fourteen UED, domain-randomisation and robotics curricula under one protocol on five 3D quadrupeds in MuJoCo MJX: the closed-chain W01-TEK and the open-chain Unitree Go1 and Go2, Google Barkour vB and Boston Dynamics Spot. Levels are vectors of eight interpretable terrain parameters, and all curricula drive the same PPO student at matched environment-step budgets. The evaluation reports success on random and held-out structured terrains, interquartile means with stratified bootstrap intervals, capability envelopes and a level-by-level domination comparison. We compare methods within each robot and report, per level set, the top group of methods not significantly below the best. No method is in the top group on every robot and level set. Methods with easy or low-difficulty training levels, curated or not, fill the top groups on in-distribution random levels of Go1 and Barkour, and of W01-TEK apart from PAIRED+BiBC. The success-driven terrain curriculum from legged-robot practice is in a top group most often, domain randomisation on uniform levels in none, and PAIRED in none outside Spot, where the fourteen methods lie within 3.8 points on random levels of difficulty 0.25. On three robots the leader on in-distribution random levels is not the leader on held-out terrain. We collect the results into a per-robot guide to choosing a curriculum.

22 pages, 10 figures. Code, level space and evaluation suite: this https URL

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.40364 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.40364v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.40364 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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