English

Dreamer-CDP: Improving Reconstruction-free World Models Via Continuous Deterministic Representation Prediction

Machine Learning 2026-04-15 v2

Abstract

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agents operating in high-dimensional observation spaces, such as Dreamer, rely on learning abstract representations for effective planning and control. Existing approaches typically employ reconstruction-based objectives in the observation space, which can render representations sensitive to task-irrelevant details. Recent alternatives trade reconstruction for auxiliary action prediction heads or view augmentation strategies, but perform worse in the Crafter environment than reconstruction-based methods. We close this gap between Dreamer and reconstruction-free models by introducing a JEPA-style predictor defined on continuous, deterministic representations. Our method matches Dreamer's performance on Crafter, demonstrating effective world model learning on this benchmark without reconstruction objectives.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.07083,
  title  = {Dreamer-CDP: Improving Reconstruction-free World Models Via Continuous Deterministic Representation Prediction},
  author = {Michael Hauri and Friedemann Zenke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.07083},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:08:19.268Z