Dynamics-aligned shared hypernetworks for zero-shot actuator inversion

Zero-shot generalization in contextual reinforcement learning remains a core challenge, particularly when the context is latent and must be inferred from data. A canonical failure mode is actuator inversion, where identical actions produce opposite physical effects under a latent binary context. We propose DMA*-SH, a framework where a single hypernetwork, trained solely via dynamics prediction, generates a small set of adapter weights shared across the dynamics model, policy, and action-value function. This shared modulation imparts an inductive bias matched to actuator inversion, while input/output normalization and random input masking stabilize context inference, promoting directionally concentrated representations. We provide theoretical support via an expressivity separation result for hypernetwork modulation, and a variance decomposition with policy-gradient variance bounds that formalize how within-mode compression improves learning under actuator inversion. For evaluation, we introduce the Actuator Inversion Benchmark (AIB), a suite of environments designed to isolate discontinuous context-to-dynamics interactions. On AIB's held-out actuator-inversion tasks, DMA*-SH achieves zero-shot generalization, outperforming domain randomization by 111.8% and surpassing a standard context-aware baseline by 16.1%.

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600: Technology

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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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2602.06550v2.pdf

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Dynamics-aligned shared hypernetworks for zero-shot actuator inversion