Bundled Contact Gradients: Stabilizing Differentiable Simulation for Deployable Dynamic Tasks

arXiv:2609.30951 · cs.RO · Submitted 2026-09-25 · Read on arXiv

cs.RO

Submitted: 2026-09-25

Updated: 2026-09-25

Code: https://github.com/NVIDIA/warp

Terminology

• Fidelity — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Bundled Contact Gradients — 9× in this paper
• Reinforcement Learning — 6× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Actor — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Accuracy — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Zero-Shot Transfer — 3× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Aggregation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Deep Reinforcement Learning — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Sample Efficiency — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Sim-to-Real Transfer — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Actor-Critic Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Computational overhead — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Hybrid System — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Principal Component Analysis (PCA) — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning (RL) — 1× in this paper · explained in 25 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes

Sources

• Gradients are Not All You Need
• Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
• Brax -- A Differentiable Physics Engine for Large Scale Rigid Body Simulation
• Leveraging Reward Gradients For Reinforcement Learning in Differentiable Physics Simulations
• Learning Quadruped Locomotion Using Differentiable Simulation
• First Order Model-Based RL through Decoupled Backpropagation
• Residual Policy Learning for Perceptive Quadruped Control Using Differentiable Simulation
• Dojo: A Differentiable Physics Engine for Robotics
• Augmenting differentiable physics with randomized smoothing

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