Trajectory-Level Automatic Curriculum Learning for Legged Locomotion on Unstructured Terrain
2608.16164

Authors

Xinyi Tong,Hongzhao Xie,Siyuan Huang,Rocky Liu,Tengyu Liu

Abstract

Training locomotion policies for complex unstructured terrain requires a curriculum to avoid early exploration failures. However, since unstructured terrain lacks explicit difficulty ordering for curriculum design, existing methods resort to heuristic curricula over parameterized terrains.

This abstraction limits generalization, as policies can overadapt to near-fixed perceptual patterns. To address this, we propose \ourname{}, an Trajectory-level Automatic Curriculum Learning framework that generates training tasks directly from unstructured terrain maps. At each curriculum update, the evaluator learns a difficulty function for the current policy that maps a given trajectory task to a difficulty score.

The sampler then proposes new trajectories guided by the learned evaluator as the curriculum for the next policy update. This forms a closed loop in which the curriculum is iteratively matched to the evolving policy.

Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that \ourname{} continuously provides effective curricula on unstructured terrain, improving trajectory success rate by $56.3\%$ over direct training without curriculum. Compared with handcrafted curriculum learning, our method improves success rate by $18.5\%$ on the hardest terrain tasks and by up to $39.74\%$ when evaluating traversal from diverse approach directions on the same obstacle type.

Resources

Ray graphicRay graphicRay graphicRay graphic

Stay in the loop

Every AI paper that matters, free in your inbox daily.

Details

  • takara.ai
  • Custom AI and machine learning from the Frontier Research Team.
  • © 2026 takara.ai Ltd
  • Content is sourced from third-party publications.
Ray graphicRay graphicRay graphic