PcLast: Discovering Plannable Continuous Latent States
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Abstract (arXiv)
Goal-conditioned planning benefits from learned low-dimensional representations of rich observations. While compact latent representations typically learned from variational autoencoders or inverse dynamics enable goal-conditioned decision making, they ignore state reachability, hampering their performance. In this paper, we learn a representation that associates reachable states together for effective planning and goal-conditioned policy learning. We first learn a latent representation with multi-step inverse dynamics (to remove distracting information), and then transform this representation to associate reachable states together in ℓ2 space. Our proposals are rigorously tested in various simulation testbeds. Numerical results in reward-based settings show significant improvements in sampling efficiency. Further, in reward-free settings this approach yields layered state abstractions that enable computationally efficient hierarchical planning for reaching ad hoc goals with zero additional samples.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 41 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2023.
Builds on
41 of 63 references.
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29 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 0; 2026: 3.
4 papers.
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- 2026Predictive but Not Plannable: RC-aux for Latent World Models8 May 2026
- 2026Laplacian Representations for Decision-Time Planning4 Feb 2026
- 2026When Does Predictive Inverse Dynamics Outperform Behavior Cloning?29 Jan 2026
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