Generalization in visual reinforcement learning (VRL) aims to learn agents that can adapt to test environments with unseen visual distractions. Despite advances in robust representations learning, many methods do not take into account the essential downstream task of sequential decision-making. This leads to representations that lack critical long-term information, impairing decision-making abilities in test environments. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel robust action-value representation learning (ROUSER) under the information bottleneck (IB) framework. ROUSER learns robust representations to capture long-term information from the decision-making objective (i.e., action values). Specifically, ROUSER uses IB to encode robust representations by maximizing their mutual information with action values for long-term information, while minimizing mutual information with state-action pairs to discard irrelevant features. As action values are unknown, ROUSER proposes to decompose robust representations of state-action pairs into one-step rewards and robust representations of subsequent pairs. Thus, it can use known rewards to compute the loss for robust representation learning. Moreover, we show that ROUSER accurately estimates action values using learned robust representations, making it applicable to various VRL algorithms. Experiments demonstrate that ROUSER outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in eleven out of twelve tasks, across both unseen background and color distractions.

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) has raised more attention in night-time surveillance applications due to the struggle to capture valid appearance information under poor illumination conditions via visible cameras. Existing works usually separate the modality-specific and modality-irrelevant information in visible and infrared features, or project features of two modalities into a unified embedding feature space directly, which aims to eliminate huge modality discrepancies. However, these methods neglect the intra-modality and inter-modality correlations. We argue that the correlations can implicitly guide the network to discover the modality-irrelevant information, thus more beneficial for eliminating huge modality discrepancies and preserving individual differences. To this end, we propose a novel framework, termed as correlation-guided semantic consistency network (CSC-Net), to explore and exploit the intra-modality and inter-modality correlations. Specifically, CSC-Net consists of a cross-modality semantic alignment (CSA) module, a cross-granularity discrepancy awareness (CDA) module, and a probability consistency constraint (PCC) module. CSA mines the inter-modality correlation by calculating the semantic similarity between modalities to explore modality-irrelevant features, and then transfers the learned features to the backbone network to face the input of only single modality images. To preserve the individual differences, CDA sufficiently utilizes the intra-modality correlation via exploring the multi-granularity discriminative information. Finally, PCC constrains the network at the probability level, cooperating with the CSA which constrains at the feature level, to further alleviate the modality discrepancy. Extensive experiments on two public VI-ReID datasets SYSU-MM01 and RegDB have verified the effectiveness of our approach.