# Light-weight probing of unsupervised representations for Reinforcement Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.12345 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12345/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08265/) (2019)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [Exploration by Random Network Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12894/) (2018)
- [DeepMind Control Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00690/) (2018)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13264/) (2021)
- [Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02298/) (2017)
- [CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04136/) (2020)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning that Matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06560/) (2017)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13649/) (2020)
- [Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Atari](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00374/) (2019)
- [Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06888/) (2017)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Unsupervised Auxiliary Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05397/) (2016)
- [Temporal Difference Learning for Model Predictive Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04955/) (2022)
- [Planning to Explore via Self-Supervised World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05960/) (2020)
- [Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Self-Predictive Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05929/) (2020)
- [Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04355/) (2018)
- [Revisiting the Arcade Learning Environment: Evaluation Protocols and Open Problems for General Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06009/) (2017)
- [Decoupling Representation Learning from Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08319/) (2020)
- [Mastering Atari Games with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00210/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [A Cookbook of Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12210/) (2023)
- [Learning from Reward-Free Offline Data: A Case for Planning with Latent Dynamics Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14819/) (2025)
- [Latent Action Learning Requires Supervision in the Presence of Distractors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00379/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03208/) (2026)
- [Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures Focus on Slow Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10831/) (2022)
- [Pretraining in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03959/) (2022)
- [A Survey of State Representation Learning for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17518/) (2025)
- [Olaf-World: Orienting Latent Actions for Video World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10104/) (2026)
- [On the Importance of Feature Decorrelation for Unsupervised Representation Learning in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05637/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Tactile-based Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21609/) (2025)
- [Investigating Pre-Training Objectives for Generalization in Vision-Based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06037/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Sim2Real Gap: Vision Encoder Pre-Training for Visuomotor Policy Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16389/) (2025)
- [Probing Neural Combinatorial Optimization Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22131/) (2025)
- [Policy-Induced Self-Supervision Improves Representation Finetuning in Visual RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06009/) (2023)
- [Grasping Student: semi-supervised learning for robotic manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04452/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised visual representation learning offers the opportunity to leverage large corpora of unlabeled trajectories to form useful visual representations, which can benefit the training of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, evaluating the fitness of such representations requires training RL algorithms which is computationally intensive and has high variance outcomes. Inspired by the vision community, we study whether linear probing can be a proxy evaluation task for the quality of unsupervised RL representation. Specifically, we probe for the observed reward in a given state and the action of an expert in a given state, both of which are generally applicable to many RL domains. Through rigorous experimentation, we show that the probing tasks are strongly rank correlated with the downstream RL performance on the Atari100k Benchmark, while having lower variance and up to 600x lower computational cost. This provides a more efficient method for exploring the space of pretraining algorithms and identifying promising pretraining recipes without the need to run RL evaluations for every setting. Leveraging this framework, we further improve existing self-supervised learning (SSL) recipes for RL, highlighting the importance of the forward model, the size of the visual backbone, and the precise formulation of the unsupervised objective.