arXiv AI By Christopher Watson, Arjun Krishna, Dinesh Jayaraman, Rajeev Alur

Let it Cook: Learning to Wait in Sequential Decision Making

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arXiv:2608. 11511v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In sequential decision making, an agent typically observes its environment and acts at every timestep.

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arXiv AI
Jul 14

Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Unobservable Random Delays

arXiv:2506. 14411v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In standard reinforcement learning (RL) settings, the interaction between the agent and the environment is typically modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP), which assumes that the agent observes the system state instantaneously, selects an action without delay, and executes it immediately.

By John Wikman, Alexandre Proutiere, David Broman
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Policy Complexity, Reaction Time, and Bounded Rationality in Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces MI‑SARSA, an on‑policy temporal‑difference algorithm that incorporates mutual‑information regularization to model bounded rationality in reinforcement learning. By penalizing state‑specific deviations from a learned marginal action prior, the algorithm selectively uses state information only when the expected return outweighs the informational cost, yielding a reward‑complexity tradeoff. MI‑SARSA also predicts reaction times, showing that stronger information penalties lead to simpler policies, lower control costs, and faster responses, while regularization mitigates performance loss after environmental shifts at the expense of asymptotic return.

By James Wu, Chris R. Sims
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Imagine-then-Plan: Agent Learning from Adaptive Lookahead with World Models

The paper introduces Imagine-then-Plan (ITP), a framework that lets agents learn by interacting with a learned world model to generate multi-step imagined trajectories. ITP features an adaptive lookahead mechanism that balances ultimate goals with task progress, producing richer signals about future outcomes. Experiments on various benchmarks show that ITP outperforms existing baselines, and analyses suggest the adaptive lookahead improves reasoning for complex tasks.

By Youwei Liu, Jian Wang, Hanlin Wang, Beichen Guo, Wenjie Li