Effective machine learning depends not only on how we model data, but also on what data we choose to collect. While large sequence models have revolutionized data modeling, the problem of automated data selection, or "intrinsic curiosity", remains a significant challenge.
arXiv:2601. 19810v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks.
By Octavio Pappalardo
arXiv:2604. 18701v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Local prediction-error-based curiosity rewards focus on the current transition without considering the world model's cumulative prediction error across all visited transitions.
By Vin Bhaskara, Haicheng Wang
arXiv:2607. 08647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As autonomous agents are increasingly deployed across diverse operational contexts, aligning their behavior with human intent demands reward functions that remain robust to such changes rather than overfitting to any single environment.
By Ali Larian, Qian Lin, Chang Zong Wu, Daniel S. Brown
arXiv:2606. 06673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse rewards and heterogeneous task sequences remain persistent challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL), often resulting in slow convergence, weak generalization, and inefficient exploration.
By Ujjwal Bhatta, Utsabi Dangol, Sumaly Bajracharya, Rodrigue Rizk, KC Santosh
arXiv:2607. 28408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This thesis studies policy learning in interactive systems where an agent observes a context, selects an action from a very large set, and receives partial feedback.
By Imad Aouali
arXiv:2410. 03565v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the zero-shot policy transfer (ZSPT) setting for contextual Markov decision processes (CMDP), agents train on a fixed, finite set of contexts and must generalize to new ones.
By Max Weltevrede, Caroline Horsch, Matthijs T. J. Spaan, Wendelin B\"ohmer
arXiv:2607. 19232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) intends to separate strategic planning from primitive execution.
By Kshitij Kumar Srivastava, Kshitij Jerath
arXiv:2607. 11906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of decision-pretrained transformers, algorithm distillation, long-context meta-RL, and retrieval-augmented agents has renewed interest in in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL): the ability of a pretrained or fine-tuned decision model to infer latent task rules and improve future behavior from interaction context, without test-time parameter updates.
By A Run, Ziluo Ding
arXiv:2602. 17976v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In active sequential testing, also termed pure exploration, a learner is tasked with the goal to adaptively acquire information so as to identify an unknown ground-truth hypothesis with as few queries as possible.
By Alessio Russo, Yin-Ching Lee, Ryan Welch, Aldo Pacchiano
arXiv:2607. 08837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploration is essential to RL since a policy cannot improve by repeatedly sampling the behaviors it already prefers.
By Sunshine Jiang, John Marangola, David Zhang, Raghuram Kowdeed, Ruiyang Luo, Nitish Dashora, Richard Li, Pulkit Agrawal, Zhang-Wei Hong
arXiv:2608. 10499v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personalized Federated Reinforcement Learning (PFRL) takes a decentralized approach to storing and accessing information based on past experiences while keeping each client's data private during the learning of each client's policy.
By Md Rafid Islam, Rafsan Jany, Zahid Hasan, Ratun Rahman