SourceBisimulation Metric for Model Predictive Control
The authors test TD-MPC on 5 DM Control image-based tasks by overlaying driving videos from the Kinetics dataset as irrelevant background noise on the original observation images. Under this condition, TD-MPC's encoder, which lacks an explicit objective to filter irrelevant features, fails to retain task-relevant information and the agent fails to gain reward. The degradation is observed across all 5 tested environments and 5 random seeds, making it a reproducible failure condition triggered by the presence of visually irrelevant content in the input.