Fig. 5: Transfer to unfamiliar flows and Reynolds numbers.

A Agents trained at Re = 400 and tested in the same wake under -30^∘ misalignment between the wake and inertial frame: geocentric agent fails where the egocentric agent succeeds (Supplementary Movies 1). B With increasing misalignment, the success rate of the geocentric agent quickly drops to nearly zero; whereas the performance of the egocentric agent is invariant to such rotations. Geocentric and egocentric agents trained at Re = 400 succeed when tested at (C) Re = 200 and (D) Re = 1000 (Supplementary Movies 2). E Success rates of geocentric and egocentric agents trained in CFD wake at Re = 400 and tested across a range of Reynolds numbers are summarized using box plots, where the median, lower, and upper quartiles are indicated with horizontal bars, and outliers are marked by “×”. All 17 geocentric and 16 egocentric policies are included, each tested over 1000 test cases. P.d.f. plots of visual and flow observations collected at Re = 200, 400, and 1000 are provided in Supplementary Fig. 7. Agents trained at Re = 1000 succeed when tested at (F) Re = 1000 and (G) Re  = 600. H Success rates of geocentric and egocentric agents trained in CFD wake at Re = 1000 and tested across a range of Reynolds numbers are summarized using the same box plot convention as in (C). All 5 geocentric and 5 egocentric policies are included, each tested over 1000 test cases. In (E, H) to evaluate the difference in performance between the egocentric and geocentric policies, a two-sample t-test is used^119,120. The null hypothesis states that there is no significant difference in success rates. A smaller p-value indicates stronger evidence against the null hypothesis, suggesting a more significant difference in performance. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001.