English

Multi-scale Predictive Representations for Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2026-05-12 v1

Abstract

This paper investigates robust representation learning in offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL). Particularly in sparse reward scenarios, learning representations that align state and goal latents is a challenge that frequently culminates in representation divergence where the encoder drifts toward a low-dimensional, goal-agnostic subspace that destabilizes policy learning. We address this issue by showing that an agent must acquire a fundamental understanding of its environment across multiple scales, from local physical dynamics to long-horizon goal-directed structure. Building on this insight, we propose Ms.PR, a framework that leverages multi-scale predictive supervision to enforce goal-directed alignment within the latent space. We demonstrate that Ms.PR leads to improved representation quality and strong performance on both vision and state-based tasks. Furthermore, we show that our approach is exceptionally resilient under realistic, challenging data regimes, maintaining state-of-the-art performance across a wide variety of tasks, trajectory stitching scenarios, and extreme noise conditions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.09364,
  title  = {Multi-scale Predictive Representations for Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Valliappan Chidambaram Adaikkappan and David Meger and Sai Rajeswar and Pietro Mazzaglia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.09364},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T13:01:20.028Z