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arXiv · 2605.09364

Multi-scale Predictive Representations for Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Valliappan Chidambaram Adaikkappan·David Meger·Sai Rajeswar·Pietro Mazzaglia
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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.

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Valliappan Chidambaram Adaikkappan, David Meger, Sai Rajeswar, Pietro Mazzaglia. 2026-05-10. Multi-scale Predictive Representations for Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09364

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