{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/hierarchically-decoupled-imitation-for","title":"Hierarchically Decoupled Imitation for Morphological Transfer","arxiv_id":"2003.01709","date":"2020-03-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Donald J. Hejna III","Pieter Abbeel","Lerrel Pinto"],"abstract":"Learning long-range behaviors on complex high-dimensional agents is a fundamental problem in robot learning. For such tasks, we argue that transferring learned information from a morphologically simpler agent can massively improve the sample efficiency of a more complex one. To this end, we propose a hierarchical decoupling of policies into two parts: an independently learned low-level policy and a transferable high-level policy. To remedy poor transfer performance due to mismatch in morphologies, we contribute two key ideas. First, we show that incentivizing a complex agent's low-level to imitate a simpler agent's low-level significantly improves zero-shot high-level transfer. Second, we show that KL-regularized training of the high level stabilizes learning and prevents mode-collapse. Finally, on a suite of publicly released navigation and manipulation environments, we demonstrate the applicability of hierarchical transfer on long-range tasks across morphologies. Our code and videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/morphology-transfer.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.01709v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.01709v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"hierarchically-decoupled-imitation-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/jhejna/hierarchical_morphology_transfer","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2003.01709","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}