arXiv AI

Visualizing the World Model in an Agent's Value Function

arXiv AI
Sep 15

Toward Self-Adaptive Physical AI: Can LLM Agents Manage Long-Horizon Physical Tasks?

The paper investigates whether large language model (LLM) agents can autonomously manage long‑horizon physical tasks without human intervention. It proposes a multi‑agent framework that combines planning, tool calling, observation, and verification, and tests it on agricultural tasks under varying weather conditions. Results show that zero‑shot LLM agents match reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the same environment and outperform RL when the environment shifts, suggesting a viable path for self‑adaptive physical AI.

By Varun Kaushik, Yayun Tan, Xiaofan Yu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

When Do Intrinsic Rewards Lead to Exploration?

The paper investigates when intrinsic rewards effectively drive exploration in reinforcement learning. It introduces a formal criterion that evaluates policies based on the counterfactual information they acquire, comparing how well their histories can replace experience from alternative policies. Using a simple environment, the authors show that common intrinsic reward objectives—count-based, prediction-error, empowerment, and information-gain—can lead to Pareto-suboptimal exploration under this criterion, and they propose conditions and a new objective that better align with optimal exploration.

By Scott W. Viteri (Stanford University), Laura Gomezjurado Gonzalez (Stanford University), Clark Barrett (Stanford University)
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Towards Zero-Shot Task Transfer with Neurosymbolic World Models

The paper introduces a neurosymbolic world model that separates observation reconstruction from reward prediction, enabling the model to adapt zero‑shot to new reward functions defined over a shared symbolic state space. This approach addresses the task‑dependency of traditional neural world models, which learn latent representations tied to specific training tasks. Experiments show that the neurosymbolic formulation generalises more strongly than purely neural methods.

By Isidoro Tamassia, Lennert De Smet, Giuseppe Marra
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Reinforcement Learning with Temporal-Logic-Based Causal Diagrams

The paper introduces Temporal-Logic-based Causal Diagrams (TL-CDs) for reinforcement learning tasks that involve temporally extended goals. TL-CDs encode causal relationships among environmental properties, complementing deterministic finite automata that model rewards. By leveraging TL-CDs, the authors design an RL algorithm that can predict expected rewards early, leading to significantly reduced exploration and faster convergence to optimal policies.

By Yash Paliwal, Rajarshi Roy, Jean-Rapha\"el Gaglione, Nasim Baharisangari, Daniel Neider, Xiaoming Duan, Ufuk Topcu, Zhe Xu
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Beyond Prediction: Steering VLM Agents with Retrospective World Modeling

The paper introduces Retrospective World Modeling, a new paradigm for vision‑language‑model (VLM) agents that allows them to reason backward by estimating which action most likely caused a state transition. It proposes the Self‑Consistency Reward (SCR), an intrinsic signal that measures how well a policy action aligns with this retrospective explanation, providing dense transition‑level feedback. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating SCR improves policy robustness and generalization compared to purely prospective world‑modeling approaches.

By Yongjiang Liu, Jie Zhang, Haoyue Zhang, Jingcai Guo, Deze Zeng, Song Guo
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

Learning of Robot Safety Policies via Adversarial Synthetic Scenarios

In this work, we propose an agentic gamification framework for hazard-informed learning of robot safety policies through synthetic scenarios. We model scenario generation as an adversarial game between two agents: a Red Team that explores the space of potential failures by constructing hazardous situations, and a Blue Team that incrementally refines safety policies to prevent them.