cs.ROMar 2, 2026

ACDC: Adaptive Curriculum Planning with Dynamic Contrastive Control for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Manipulation

Authors: Xuerui Wang, Guangyu Ren, Tianhong Dai, Bintao Hu, Shuangyao Huang, Wenzhang Zhang, Hengyan Liu

Organizations: Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA · Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China · Applied Computing, UK

Abstract

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning has shown considerable potential in robotic manipulation; however, existing approaches remain limited by their reliance on prioritizing collected experience, resulting in suboptimal performance across diverse tasks. Inspired by human learning behaviors, we propose a more comprehensive learning paradigm, ACDC, which integrates multidimensional Adaptive Curriculum (AC) Planning with Dynamic Contrastive (DC) Control to guide the agent along a well-designed learning trajectory. More specifically, at the planning level, the AC component schedules the learning curriculum by dynamically balancing diversity-driven exploration and quality-driven exploitation based on the agent's success rate and training progress. At the control level, the DC component implements the curriculum plan through norm-constrained contrastive learning, enabling magnitude-guided experience selection aligned with the current curriculum focus. Extensive experiments on challenging robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that ACDC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in both sample efficiency and final task success rate.

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