aiqbench analysis
MorFiC addresses a critical inefficiency in reinforcement learning for robotics by correcting value miscalibration in actor-critic models, enabling zero-shot transfer of locomotion policies across diverse quadrupedal morphologies. This approach significantly reduces computational costs and training time compared to scaling-based methods, allowing a single source robot to adapt to multiple embodiments without fine-tuning.
MorFiC: Fixing Value Miscalibration for Zero-Shot Quadruped Transfer
arXiv:2603.14554v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generalizing learned locomotion policies across quadrupedal robots with different morphologies remains a challenge. Policies trained on a single robot often fail when deployed on embodiments with different mass distributions, kinematics, joint limits, or actuation constraints, forcing per-robot retraining. Prior works have approached this primarily either by scaling via training across real or generated embodiments or using large architectures producing transferable policies which are both storage and compute heavy. We argue that both of these approaches circumvent a key failure mode in actor-critic learning: a shared value function tends to average incompatible value targets across embodiments, yielding miscalibrated advantages and fixing that helps transfer and reduce the compute cost. We present MorFiC, a reinforcement learning approach for zero-shot cross-morphology locomotion which fixes this issue using multiplicative critic conditioning on a morphology latent. Trained with a single source robot with morphology randomization in simulation, MorFiC achieves zero-shot transfer to total seven robots and reaching forward velocity competitive or surpassing scaling-based and morphology-conditioned PPO baselines for examples 1.98 m/s on AlienGo, where as additive PPO baselines remain below 0.65 m/s. MorFiC achieves this using single training robot within 2 hours of training time compared to tens or hundreds of hours required for scaling baselines training on multiple embodiments. We diagnose critic calibration via three metric: Explained variance, advantage sign-flip rate and policy gradient cosine, confirming our critic conditioning as determinant for policy update direction. Finally, we demonstrate zero-shot deployment on Unitree Go1 and Go2 robots without fine-tuning.
Abstract:Generalizing learned locomotion policies across quadrupedal robots with different morphologies remains a challenge. Policies trained on a single robot often fail when deployed on embodiments with different mass distributions, kinematics, joint limits, or actuation constraints, forcing per-robot retraining. Prior works have approached this primarily either by scaling via training across real or generated embodiments or using large architectures producing transferable policies which are both storage and compute heavy. We argue that both of these approaches circumvent a key failure mode in actor-critic learning: a shared value function tends to average incompatible value targets across embodiments, yielding miscalibrated advantages and fixing that helps transfer and reduce the compute cost. We present MorFiC, a reinforcement learning approach for zero-shot cross-morphology locomotion which fixes this issue using multiplicative critic conditioning on a morphology latent. Trained with a single source robot with morphology randomization in simulation, MorFiC achieves zero-shot transfer to total seven robots and reaching forward velocity competitive or surpassing scaling-based and morphology-conditioned PPO baselines for examples 1.98 m/s on AlienGo, where as additive PPO baselines remain below 0.65 m/s. MorFiC achieves this using single training robot within 2 hours of training time compared to tens or hundreds of hours required for scaling baselines training on multiple embodiments. We diagnose critic calibration via three metric: Explained variance, advantage sign-flip rate and policy gradient cosine, confirming our critic conditioning as determinant for policy update direction. Finally, we demonstrate zero-shot deployment on Unitree Go1 and Go2 robots without fine-tuning.
Robotics (cs.RO)
arXiv:2603.14554 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2603.14554v2 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.14554 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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