Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction is a Strong Baseline For Behavioral Foundation Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission23493 Authors

Keywords: Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs), Zero-shot Reinforcement Learning, Zero-shot RL, Representation Learning, Unsupervised RL

Abstract: Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) have been recently successful in producing agents with the capabilities to adapt to any unknown reward or task. In reality, these methods are only able to produce near-optimal policies for the reward functions that are in the span of some pre-existing _state features_. Naturally, their efficiency relies heavily on the choice of state features that they use. As a result, these BFMs have used a wide variety of complex objectives, often sensitive to environment coverage, to train task spanning features with different inductive properties. With this work, our aim is to examine the question: are these complex representation learning objectives necessary for zero-shot RL? Specifically, we revisit the objective of self-supervised next-state prediction in latent space for state feature learning, but observe that such an objective alone is prone to increasing state-feature similarity, and subsequently reducing span of reward functions that we can represent optimal policies for. We propose an approach, RLDP, that adds a simple regularization to maintain feature diversity and can match or surpass state-of-the-art complex representation learning methods for zero-shot RL. Furthermore, we demonstrate the prior approaches diverge in low-coverage scenarios where RLDP still succeeds.

Primary Area: reinforcement learning

Submission Number: 23493