This paper presents Chronocooked, a reinforcement learning (RL) benchmark suite for studying implicit interval timing in RL agents. Inspired by Overcooked, the suite comprises cooking scenarios that require temporal decision making.
arXiv:2607. 20656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective decision-making in complex and changing environments requires balancing short-term and long-term consequences.
By Manoosh Samiei, Doina Precup, Paul Masset
arXiv:2608. 11511v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In sequential decision making, an agent typically observes its environment and acts at every timestep.
By Christopher Watson, Arjun Krishna, Dinesh Jayaraman, Rajeev Alur
The paper introduces Generalized Implicit Temporal Abstraction (GITA), a method for goal-conditioned reinforcement learning that conditions a single value function on multiple temporal abstraction levels (k). By aggregating advantage-weighted supervision across various k values, GITA preserves both long-range signal and local resolution without committing to a single k. Experiments on OGBench show that GITA outperforms existing offline GCRL baselines, improving average success rates by 25 percentage points over HIQL and 7 percentage points over OTA.
By Pedro Robles Dutenhefner, Dikshant Shehmar, Wagner Meira Jr., Marlos C. Machado
arXiv:2605. 11484v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Task completion in digital and physical environments increasingly involves complex temporal interaction, where actions and observations unfold over different time scales rather than align with fixed observation--action steps.
By Jialian Li, Yuchen Cao, Junhong Liu, Weiran Guo, Xutao Wang, Jiaming Song, Jiahao Zhang, Jie Chen
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:2609.05519v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We propose a unified strategy for fast goal inference in human-robot interaction. The core idea is to drive the human toward Critical Decision Points...
By Debasmita Ghose, Oz Gitelson, Michal Lewkowicz, Jake Brawer, Marynel Vazquez, Brian Scassellati
The paper introduces ARLI, a latency‑aware framework that enables reinforcement learning fine‑tuning of large generalist robot policies despite inference delays. ARLI combines asynchronous inference with state augmentations—incorporating committed actions and mid‑inference observations—to restore near‑Markovian dynamics and maintain reactivity. Experiments on simulated and real‑world manipulation tasks show that ARLI allows effective policy improvement under latency, outperforming standard RL even in no‑latency scenarios.
By Brian Zhu (Siemens), Momen Khalil (Siemens), E Harrison (UC Berkeley), Emanuele Poggi (Siemens), Philipp Schmitt (Siemens), Bernd Kast (Siemens), Philine Meister (Siemens), Pranav Atreya (UC Berkeley), Qiyang Li (UC Berkeley), Finn Ferchau (Siemens), Cesar Colmenero (Siemens), Yash Shahapurkar (Siemens), Gokul Narayanan (Siemens), Melih Erdogan (Siemens), Kai Wurm (Siemens), Georg von Wichert (Siemens), Oier Mees (Microsoft, ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley), Eugen Solowjow (Siemens), Andrew Wagenmaker (UC Berkeley), Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley)
The paper investigates whether small large language model agents can operate within explicit wall‑clock time budgets while using the allotted time productively. Experiments with Qwen3.6‑27B on MLE‑Bench Lite and Qwen3‑4B on Zork I show that agents fail to translate budget statements into controlled time use, largely due to lack of timing feedback and poor anticipation of action durations. Interventions such as harness‑based timing exposure, enforcement hooks, and reinforcement learning with budget‑aware rewards improve budget adherence but do not lead to better task performance, revealing a persistent gap between respecting time limits and effectively allocating extra time.
By Aaron Wang, Neelabh Madan, Vlad Sobal, Matthew Trager, Michael Kleinman, Elman Mansimov, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
arXiv:2606. 26463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deliberating takes time.
By Aneesh Muppidi, Firas Darwish, Dylan Cope, Jo\~ao F. Henriques, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
The paper reviews hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) as a method for enabling agents to explore, plan, and learn in complex, open-ended environments by uncovering temporal structure in experience streams. It discusses the unclear definition of what makes a structure useful, the benefits of HRL for decision‑making challenges, and its impact on AI agent performance trade‑offs. The authors survey various HRL methods—from online learning to offline datasets and large language model integration—and outline the challenges and suitable domains for temporal structure discovery.
By Martin Klissarov, Akhil Bagaria, Ziyan Luo, George Konidaris, Doina Precup, Marlos C. Machado
Deep Reinforcement Learning policies can produce nonsmooth action oscillations that hinder deployment on physical robots. Existing architectural and penalty-based approaches seek spatial smoothness by...