Explore to Learn: Latent Exploration Through Disentangled Synergy Patterns for Reinforcement Learning in Overactuated Control

Abstract

Control in high-dimensional action spaces remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), primarily due to inefficient exploration of the action space. While recent methods attempt to guide exploration, they often fall short of achieving the agility and coordination exhibited in biological motor control. Inspired by how organisms exploit muscle synergies for efficient movement, we propose Explore to Learn (ETL), a two-stage framework that first discovers fundamental synergy patterns and then leverages them for task-specific policy learning. In the first stage, ETL discovers underlying synergy patterns by deploying a targeted exploration policy. These patterns are modeled as latent directions in a low-dimensional space, along which the agent is guided to collect diverse and structured muscle activation trajectories. A variational autoencoder (VAE) is then trained to encode high-dimensional actions into a latent space whose dimensions correspond to the synergy patterns. In the second stage, the policy is trained entirely in this synergy-aware latent space, producing synergy coefficients that the decoder maps back to full-dimensional muscle actions. This structured representation significantly reduces the complexity of learning, while the decoder is further fine-tuned to enhance expressiveness and generalization across downstream tasks. Extensive experiments across musculoskeletal environments and the DMControl suite demonstrate that ETL consistently outperforms prior methods in both exploration efficiency and control performance, achieving superior scalability and generalization in overactuated control tasks.