English

RL + Transformer = A General-Purpose Problem Solver

Machine Learning 2025-01-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

What if artificial intelligence could not only solve problems for which it was trained but also learn to teach itself to solve new problems (i.e., meta-learn)? In this study, we demonstrate that a pre-trained transformer fine-tuned with reinforcement learning over multiple episodes develops the ability to solve problems that it has never encountered before - an emergent ability called In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL). This powerful meta-learner not only excels in solving unseen in-distribution environments with remarkable sample efficiency, but also shows strong performance in out-of-distribution environments. In addition, we show that it exhibits robustness to the quality of its training data, seamlessly stitches together behaviors from its context, and adapts to non-stationary environments. These behaviors demonstrate that an RL-trained transformer can iteratively improve upon its own solutions, making it an excellent general-purpose problem solver.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.14176,
  title  = {RL + Transformer = A General-Purpose Problem Solver},
  author = {Micah Rentschler and Jesse Roberts},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.14176},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:15:38.831Z