Task Tokens: A Flexible Approach to Adapting Behavior Foundation Models

Ron Vainshtein, Zohar Rimon, Shie Mannor, Chen Tessler

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Recent advancements in imitation learning for robotic control have led to transformer-based behavior foundation models (BFMs) that enable multi-modal, human-like control for humanoid agents. These models generate solutions when conditioned on high-level goals or prompts, for example, walking to a coordinate when conditioned on the position of the robot's pelvis. While excelling at zero-shot generation of robust behaviors, BFMs often require meticulous prompt engineering for specific tasks, potentially yielding suboptimal results. In this work, we introduce ``Task Tokens'' - a method to effectively tailor BFMs to specific tasks while preserving their flexibility. Our approach integrates naturally within the transformer architecture of BFMs. Task Tokens trains a task-specific encoder (tokenizer), with the original BFM remaining untouched. Our method reduces trainable parameters per task by up to $\times 125$ and converges up to $\times 6$ faster compared to standard baselines. In addition, by keeping the original BFM unchanged, Task Tokens enables utilizing the pre-existing encoders. This allows incorporating user-defined priors, balancing reward design and prompt engineering. We demonstrate Task Tokens' efficacy across various tasks, including out-of-distribution scenarios, and show their compatibility with other prompting modalities. Our results suggest that Task Tokens offer a promising approach for adapting BFMs to specific control tasks while retaining their generalization capabilities.