Density-Guided Bootstrap Boundaries for Latent World-Model Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Latent world models allow reinforcement learning agents to learn policies from imagined trajectories, yet determining the optimal depth of model reliance remains a fundamental challenge. Fixed imagination horizons apply uniform prediction depths regardless of trajectory reliability, exposing target values to compounding model error or over-relying on critic approximations. We introduce density-guided bootstrap boundaries, a trajectory-dependent mechanism that adapts the depth of imagined returns using a score-informed relative density proxy. The proxy accumulates the estimated divergence of a score-corrected auxiliary field formed by a feature displacement network and a noise-conditioned score estimator along imagined paths. We propose two gating mechanisms: a hard boundary that halts return expansion at a discrete state, and a soft boundary that continuously shifts the return recursion toward critic bootstrapping. Both variants preserve boundary value estimates and apply corresponding survival weights to actor and critic losses. Formulated independently of specific dynamics models and instantiated within Dreamer V3, we prove that the resulting gated Bellman operator is a strict contraction mapping and that early bootstrapping monotonically reduces conditional target variance. We clarify the theoretical assumptions distinguishing our expansion proxy from exact path likelihoods. Across continuous-control tasks and Atari Pong, empirical evaluations show that dynamic boundary selection enhances sample efficiency and late-training performance over fixed-horizon and auxiliary-enabled baselines.