Dynamics-Aligned Representation Learning under Induced Partial Observability

Overview & Synopsis

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has enabled sample-efficient learning of continuous control policies from high-dimensional observations through learned latent dynamics models. These models are typically trained with observation reconstruction objectives, which provide strong supervision but can bias representations toward visual fidelity leading to an undertrained prior and unreliable long-horizon predictions. We propose a stochastic gating mechanism that induces controlled partial observability during training by sampling a spatial binary mask from a Beta--Bernoulli random field and applying it to the raw observation. The gate probability is resampled at each time step, exposing the encoder to conditions ranging from near-total occlusion to near-full visibility. Integration of our method requires minimal architectural changes from existing dynamics models: the gated observation and the binary mask are channel-wise concatenated and passed to the encoder as a single augmented input, with no modifications to the broader training pipeline. We evaluate the proposed approach on a set of pixel-based continuous control tasks selected from the DeepMind Control Suite. Using model predictive control for evaluation, which relies solely on open-loop model rollouts, we show that stochastic gating improves planning performance and data efficiency across tasks. Further analysis demonstrates that performance is robust to the spatial scale of the mask, and a balanced observability during training outperforms configurations biased toward either sparser or denser observations.