The paper introduces Hamiltonian Temporal Contrastive Curiosity (HTC²), a method that combines multi‑horizon temporal representation learning with Hamiltonian phase‑space structure to guide exploration in physical control environments. HTC² uses a horizon‑conditioned contrastive critic to learn relationships between future state pairs within an episode, and the resulting representation distance serves as an intrinsic reward. The reward is further modulated by bounded multi‑step Hamiltonian variation, and the framework is integrated with Soft Actor‑Critic and Proximal Policy Optimization, evaluated on six DeepMind Control Suite tasks against several baseline curiosity methods.
By Shuwei Wang, Qiang Guan, Brian Qiu, Haoxiang Huang, Haoxi Wang, Chenyu Li, Bo Xu, Sen Cui
arXiv:2609.38383v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Random exploration reveals how an environment can be traversed before a goal is specified. Can this experience support long-range planning without po...
By Deqian Kong, Guangyan Sun, Sheng Cheng, Sirui Xie, Bo Pang, Jianwen Xie, Tony Geng, Caiwen Ding, Ying Nian Wu
arXiv:2606. 19476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective machine learning depends not only on how we model data, but also on what data we choose to collect.
By Eric Elmoznino, Sangnie Bhardwaj, Johannes von Oswald, Rajai Nasser, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, Jo\~ao Sacramento, Rif A. Saurous, Guillaume Lajoie
arXiv:2605. 00412v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models have recently re-emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, robotics, autonomous driving, and model-based reinforcement learning.
By Sen Cui, Jingheng Ma
arXiv:2609.05650v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We propose a reinforcement learning framework in which exploration is driven by intrinsic curiosity, designed for scenarios where environments are non-...
By Armando Vieira
The paper presents a deep active inference framework for real‑world robotic navigation that combines a diffusion policy with a multiple‑timescale recurrent state‑space model. The diffusion policy generates diverse candidate actions, while the state‑space model predicts long‑horizon outcomes, allowing the system to select actions that minimize expected free energy. Experiments show higher success rates and fewer collisions, especially in exploration‑heavy scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of this unified exploration and goal‑directed approach.
By Riko Yokozawa, Kentaro Fujii, Yuta Nomura, Shingo Murata
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:2606. 03017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward transfer in Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is unreliable when policies must generalize to unseen combinations of environment dynamics and task goals.
By Yikang Gui, Bikramjit Banerjee, Prashant Doshi
arXiv:2607. 07763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models are typically trained to predict discrete-time physical dynamics with a fixed step size baked into the model weights, preventing prediction at variable temporal resolutions.
By Eli Laird, Corey Clark
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:2607. 29419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In reinforcement learning, exploration with sparse and delayed rewards presents a significant challenge due to the limited feedback available for guiding the learning process.
By Bumgeun Park, Donghwan Lee
The paper introduces the Dual-Latent World Model (Dual-WM), which separates local execution and long-range planning into distinct latent spaces and dynamics models. A new learning method, Long-Horizon Representation Learning with Weighted Rollout (LoRe), supervises predictions at both levels using exponential horizon weights. Experiments on five goal-conditioned visual control tasks show that Dual-WM improves success rates over strong baselines, especially at longer horizons.
By Delin Zhao, Zhengrong Yue, Shaobin Zhuang, Junlin He, Xiaoyu Chen, Zikang Wang, Yuxin Liu, Limin Wang, Yali Wang