Lambda-Hold Control: Human-Like Movement Emerges from a Minimal Task Reward in Predictive Musculoskeletal Simulation

arXiv:2608.17030v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The massive overactuation in the human musculoskeletal system makes it challenging to train musculoskeletal models to generate human-like motion via reinforcement learning, primarily because exploration in the resulting high-dimensional and redundant action space is extremely inefficient. To address this problem, we propose the lambda-hold controller, inspired by the equilibrium-point (EP) hypothesis, which has been widely supported by extensive evidence from human motor control studies. The policy's control variable is the per-muscle EP threshold length lambda, from which a stretch-reflex recruitment law computes the muscle excitations automatically. Holding each lambda over an interval of the gait phase also sharply reduces the frequency at which the policy must be queried. Consequently, the controller, to our knowledge for the first time, enables a muscle-actuated skeletal model to learn human-like sprinting using only a minimal reward within an hour of training. The efficient exploration through the proposed lambda-hold controller is not merely an engineering trick but an approach grounded in physiology, bringing together the EP hypothesis, intermittent control, and optimal feedback control. Beyond encapsulating human-like behavior in predictive simulation, this achievement contributes to developing a learnable model of the human motor controller.

Source: arXiv cs.RO | 2026-08-19