STEP: Spatiotemporal Training with Explicit Prediction for Perceptive Humanoid Locomotion

Abstract

For perceptive humanoid locomotion, the relevance of terrain geometry depends on the robot's body state and how both evolve under its actions. Existing work has advanced terrain-aware sensory fusion and cross-modal prediction, improving how visual and proprioceptive information is combined and related. However, feature aggregation alone does not specify which cross-modal relationships should be learned, while prediction between simultaneous observations does not explicitly constrain their action-dependent evolution. We present Spatiotemporal Training with Explicit Prediction (STEP), a one-stage framework that jointly supervises cross-modal relationships and action-dependent state evolution within a shared control representation. Multiple learned queries aggregate depth and proprioceptive tokens into a compact policy state. Bidirectional masked prediction uses each visible modality to predict latent features of the omitted modality, explicitly supervising terrain-body relationships. An action-conditioned predictor maps the current policy state and executed action to the next fused state, with an exponential-moving-average target defined directly in the policy representation space. Simulation comparisons show overall improvements in terrain traversal over evaluated fusion alternatives and ablations, while depth-dropout and delay experiments demonstrate the benefits of both predictive objectives under degraded visual input. Deployed on a 23-DoF Noetix E1 humanoid with onboard sensing, STEP succeeds in 98 of 100 hardware trials across stairs, a 40\,cm platform, a 70\,cm gap, stepping stones, and backward stair traversal without rearward terrain visibility.