{"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/task-agnostic-dynamics-priors-for-deep","title":"Task-Agnostic Dynamics Priors for Deep Reinforcement Learning","arxiv_id":"1905.04819","date":"2019-05-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yilun Du","Karthik Narasimhan"],"abstract":"While model-based deep reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for sample efficiency and generalization, learning an accurate dynamics model is often challenging and requires substantial interaction with the environment. A wide variety of domains have dynamics that share common foundations like the laws of classical mechanics, which are rarely exploited by existing algorithms. In fact, humans continuously acquire and use such dynamics priors to easily adapt to operating in new environments. In this work, we propose an approach to learn task-agnostic dynamics priors from videos and incorporate them into an RL agent. Our method involves pre-training a frame predictor on task-agnostic physics videos to initialize dynamics models (and fine-tune them) for unseen target environments. Our frame prediction architecture, SpatialNet, is designed specifically to capture localized physical phenomena and interactions. Our approach allows for both faster policy learning and convergence to better policies, outperforming competitive approaches on several different environments. We also demonstrate that incorporating this prior allows for more effective transfer between environments.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.04819v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.04819v4.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":"task-agnostic-dynamics-priors-for-deep","repo_url":"https://github.com/yilundu/task_agnostic_dynamics_prior","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1905.04819","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1905.04819"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/yilundu/task_agnostic_dynamics_prior","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_violates":2},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":2,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"415094e2d3c0c7bd","entry":"flat","repo":"yilundu/task_agnostic_dynamics_prior","repo_kind":"official","path":"train_batch.py","file_url":"https://github.com/yilundu/task_agnostic_dynamics_prior/blob/HEAD/train_batch.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_violates","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"VIOLATES","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"415094e2d3c0c7bd"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"baf2a28d376d7803","entry":"sf01","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"ran_violates","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"VIOLATES","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"baf2a28d376d7803"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}