arXiv AI By Bernhard Hilpert, Muhan Hou, Kim Baraka, Joost Broekens

Can you see how I learn? Human observers' inferences about Reinforcement Learning agents' learning processes

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The paper investigates how human observers interpret the learning processes of reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Using a novel observation-based paradigm, the authors conducted two experiments: an exploratory interview study with nine participants that identified four core themes—Agent Goals, Knowledge, Decision Making, and Learning Mechanisms—and a confirmatory study with 34 participants that applied the paradigm across navigation and manipulation tasks and two RL algorithms. Analyses of 816 responses validated the paradigm’s reliability and refined the thematic framework, showing how these themes evolve over time and interrelate.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

CoLearn: An Agentic Tutor that Learns its Learner in a Human--AI Co-Learning Loop

CoLearn is an interactive, agentic tutoring system that learns about each learner through a persistent memory of mastery and misconceptions, updated with a Bayesian Knowledge Tracing model that uses a large language model as an observation function. It generates personalized questions targeting the learner’s weakest topics and recurring misconceptions, and provides a live evidence view for progress visualization and blind A/B comparison. In blind A/B tests, learners preferred questions conditioned on this memory 68‑69% of the time, and simulations show the agent’s belief converges toward the learner’s true mastery.

By Kailai He, Zhihao Wu, Linhai Zhang, Runcong Zhao, Yulan He, Jiazheng Li
Hugging Face Trending Papers
3d ago

Shockingly Simple Self-retrospection Improves Agentic Models Without RL

The paper explores Retrospection-Only Fine-Tuning (ROFT), a method where a language-model agent improves its behavior by generating and training on explanations of its own experiences, without external teachers or reward signals. In software‑engineering tasks with Qwen3.5‑4B, ROFT achieves comparable or better solve rates than GRPO while requiring fewer updates and training time, and can learn from failures alone. Behavioral analysis shows ROFT indirectly assigns credit to actions and can produce shorter, more direct solutions when prompted to focus on direct solutions.

arXiv AI
Jun 16

LatentGym: A Testbed For Cross-Task Experiential Learning With Controllable Latent Structure

arXiv:2606. 15306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We envision continually learning agentic systems that become more useful over time: as they encounter sequences of related tasks, they should infer the hidden structure shared across those tasks and use it to improve future decisions.

By Daksh Mittal, Tommaso Castellani, Thomson Yen, Naimeng Ye, Fangyu Wu, Minghui Chen, Tiffany Cai, Emmanouil Koukoumidis, William Zeng, Hongseok Namkoong
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Teach and Grow: An Agent-Centered Architecture for General Robot Learning

Teach-and-Grow Learning (TGL) is an agent-centered architecture that transforms a few successful demonstrations into reusable Skill Blocks, enabling a robot to compose, execute, and revise behaviors in new scenes without task-specific policy retraining. The system maintains a Skill Library and structured Experience Memory to capture successes, failures, and repairs, allowing persistent reuse and agent-directed adaptation. Evaluation on the LIBERO benchmark shows state-of-the-art performance, and the authors propose a scaling-law hypothesis suggesting that accumulated reusable experience reduces future-task error and teaching demand following a power-law trend.

By Chang Nie, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang