# CRC-RL: A Novel Visual Feature Representation Architecture for Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13473 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13473/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.02971/) (2015)
- [Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.5602/) (2013)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06461/) (2015)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (2018)
- [Soft Actor-Critic Algorithms and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05905/) (2018)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [DeepMind Control Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00690/) (2018)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00702/) (2015)
- [CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04136/) (2020)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13649/) (2020)
- [A Brief Survey of Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05866/) (2017)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14990/) (2020)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Unsupervised Auxiliary Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05397/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Deep Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06778/) (2016)
- [Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05143/) (2016)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation with Asynchronous Off-Policy Updates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00633/) (2016)
- [Improving Sample Efficiency in Model-Free Reinforcement Learning from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01741/) (2019)
- [Decoupling Representation Learning from Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08319/) (2020)
- [Transfer Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07888/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09005/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Representation Learning: Introduction, Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09327/) (2021)
- [Generalization in Reinforcement Learning by Soft Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13389/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper addresses the problem of visual feature representation learning with an aim to improve the performance of end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) models. Specifically, a novel architecture is proposed that uses a heterogeneous loss function, called CRC loss, to learn improved visual features which can then be used for policy learning in RL. The CRC-loss function is a combination of three individual loss functions, namely, contrastive, reconstruction and consistency loss. The feature representation is learned in parallel to the policy learning while sharing the weight updates through a Siamese Twin encoder model. This encoder model is augmented with a decoder network and a feature projection network to facilitate computation of the above loss components. Through empirical analysis involving latent feature visualization, an attempt is made to provide an insight into the role played by this loss function in learning new action-dependent features and how they are linked to the complexity of the problems being solved. The proposed architecture, called CRC-RL, is shown to outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods on the challenging Deep mind control suite environments by a significant margin thereby creating a new benchmark in this field.