PoLAR: Factorizing Extent and Mode in Latent Actions for Robot Policy Learning

Youngjoon Jeong, Jihwan Yu, Minsoo Jo, Junha Chun, Taesup Kim — Latent action pretraining learns representations of visual change from pairs of observations, but existing methods typically encode each transition as a single unstructured representation that entangles transition extent and transition mode. We introduce Polar Latent Actions with Radial structure (PoLAR), which imposes a radial-direction structure on latent actions, encouraging radius to encode transition extent and direction to retain transition mode. PoLAR uses temporal offset between two observations as a weak proxy for transition extent, encouraging latent action from observation pairs separated by larger temporal gaps to occupy larger radii. We instantiate this structure in hyperbolic space, whose expanding volume with radius offers a natural fit for more diverse transition modes at larger extents. Across in-task and large-scale pretraining settings, PoLAR improves downstream policy performance in simulation and real-world robot experiments, outperforming latent action baselines and strong pretrained VLAs. These results suggest that the geometry of the latent action space is an important design choice for transferring visual pretraining to downstream robot policy learning.