Preference-Conditioned Multi-Objective RL for Integrated Command Tracking and Force Compliance in Humanoid Locomotion

Abstract

Humanoid locomotion requires not only accurate command tracking for navigation but also compliant responses to external forces during human interaction. Despite significant progress, existing RL approaches mainly emphasize robustness, yielding policies that resist external forces but lack compliance particularly challenging for inherently unstable humanoids. In this work, we address this by formulating humanoid locomotion as a multi-objective optimization problem that balances command tracking and external force compliance. We introduce a preference-conditioned multi-objective RL (MORL) framework that enables a single omnidirectional locomotion policy to trade off between command following and force compliance via a user-specified preference input. External forces are modeled via velocity-resistance factor for consistent reward design, and training leverages an encoder-decoder structure that infers task-relevant privileged features from deployable observations. We validate our approach in both simulation and real-world experiments on a humanoid robot. Experimental results in simulation and on hardware show that the framework trains stably and enables deployable preference-conditioned humanoid locomotion.