Dynamics-Aligned Shared Hypernetworks for Zero-Shot Actuator Inversion
About
Zero-shot generalization in contextual reinforcement learning remains a core challenge, particularly when the context is latent and must be inferred from data. A canonical failure mode is actuator inversion, where identical actions produce opposite physical effects under a latent binary context. We propose DMA*-SH, a framework where a single hypernetwork, trained solely via dynamics prediction, generates a small set of adapter weights shared across the dynamics model, policy, and action-value function. This shared modulation imparts an inductive bias matched to actuator inversion, while input/output normalization and random input masking stabilize context inference, promoting directionally concentrated representations. We provide theoretical support via an expressivity separation result for hypernetwork modulation, and a variance decomposition with policy-gradient variance bounds that formalize how within-mode compression improves learning under actuator inversion. For evaluation, we introduce the Actuator Inversion Benchmark (AIB), a suite of environments designed to isolate discontinuous context-to-dynamics interactions. On AIB's held-out actuator-inversion tasks, DMA*-SH achieves zero-shot generalization, outperforming domain randomization by 111.8% and surpassing a standard context-aware baseline by 16.1%.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actuator Inversion | BallInCup (eval-in) | AER955 | 8 | |
| Actuator Inversion | DI-Friction C (train) | AER71 | 8 | |
| Actuator Inversion | DI-Friction (Ceval-in) | AER0.71 | 8 | |
| Zero-Shot Actuator Inversion | AIB Cheetah environment Ceval-out | AER225 | 8 | |
| Actuator Inversion | Walker C (train) | AER885 | 8 | |
| Actuator Inversion | WalkerGym C (train) | AER3.33e+3 | 8 | |
| Actuator Inversion | Walker (Ceval-in) | AER888 | 8 | |
| Actuator Inversion | WalkerGym (Ceval-in) | AER3.38e+3 | 8 | |
| Actuator Inversion | HopperGym (Ceval-in) | AER2.85e+3 | 8 | |
| Zero-Shot Actuator Inversion | AIB DI-Friction environment Ceval-out | AER62 | 8 |