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Related papers: Empowerment for Continuous Agent-Environment Syste…

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We study systems of interacting reinforced stochastic processes, where agents' decisions evolve under reinforcement, network-mediated interactions, and environmental influences. In competitive environments with irreducible networks, we…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-09-18 Michele Aleandri , Paolo Dai Pra , Ida Germana Minelli

A long-term goal of language agents is to learn and improve through their own experience, ultimately outperforming humans in complex, real-world tasks. However, training agents from experience data with reinforcement learning remains…

Continual learning is often motivated by the idea, known as the big world hypothesis, that "the world is bigger" than the agent. Recent problem formulations capture this idea by explicitly constraining an agent relative to the environment.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Alex Lewandowski , Adtiya A. Ramesh , Edan Meyer , Dale Schuurmans , Marlos C. Machado

State of the art reinforcement learning has enabled training agents on tasks of ever increasing complexity. However, the current paradigm tends to favor training agents from scratch on every new task or on collections of tasks with a view…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Jacob Walker , Eszter Vértes , Yazhe Li , Gabriel Dulac-Arnold , Ankesh Anand , Théophane Weber , Jessica B. Hamrick

Recent works have studied *state entropy maximization* in reinforcement learning, in which the agent's objective is to learn a policy inducing high entropy over states visitation (Hazan et al., 2019). They typically assume full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Riccardo Zamboni , Duilio Cirino , Marcello Restelli , Mirco Mutti

A key question in reinforcement learning is how an intelligent agent can generalize knowledge across different inputs. By generalizing across different inputs, information learned for one input can be immediately reused for improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Lucas Lehnert , Michael L. Littman

While reinforcement learning has achieved considerable successes in recent years, state-of-the-art models are often still limited by the size of state and action spaces. Model-free reinforcement learning approaches use some form of state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-23 Paul J. Pritz , Liang Ma , Kin K. Leung

In this work we create agents that can perform well beyond a single, individual task, that exhibit much wider generalisation of behaviour to a massive, rich space of challenges. We define a universe of tasks within an environment domain and…

Options represent a framework for reasoning across multiple time scales in reinforcement learning (RL). With the recent active interest in the unsupervised learning paradigm in the RL research community, the option framework was adapted to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Djordje Božić , Predrag Tadić , Mladen Nikolić

Unlike reinforcement learning (RL) agents, humans remain capable multitaskers in changing environments. In spite of only experiencing the world through their own observations and interactions, people know how to balance focusing on tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Rishav Bhagat , Jonathan Balloch , Zhiyu Lin , Julia Kim , Mark Riedl

We introduce three concepts that describe an agent's incentives: response incentives indicate which variables in the environment, such as sensitive demographic information, affect the decision under the optimal policy. Instrumental control…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Ryan Carey , Eric Langlois , Chris van Merwijk , Shane Legg , Tom Everitt

Safe navigation in complex environments remains a central challenge for reinforcement learning (RL) in robotics. This paper introduces Continuous Space-Time Empowerment for Physics-informed (C-STEP) safe RL, a novel measure of agent-centric…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-26 Guihlerme Daubt , Adrian Redder

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to behave so as to maximise the sum of a suitable scalar function of state: the reward. These rewards are typically given and immutable. In this paper, we instead consider the proposition…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Zeyu Zheng , Junhyuk Oh , Matteo Hessel , Zhongwen Xu , Manuel Kroiss , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver , Satinder Singh

General purpose agents will require large repertoires of skills. Empowerment -- the maximum mutual information between skills and states -- provides a pathway for learning large collections of distinct skills, but mutual information is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Andrew Levy , Sreehari Rammohan , Alessandro Allievi , Scott Niekum , George Konidaris

We address the problem of reinforcement learning in which observations may exhibit an arbitrary form of stochastic dependence on past observations and actions, i.e. environments more general than (PO)MDPs. The task for an agent is to attain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Daniil Ryabko , Marcus Hutter

This paper proposes a definition of system health in the context of multiple agents optimizing a joint reward function. We use this definition as a credit assignment term in a policy gradient algorithm to distinguish the contributions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-06 Ross E. Allen , Jayesh K. Gupta , Jaime Pena , Yutai Zhou , Javona White Bear , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

In the sequential decision making setting, an agent aims to achieve systematic generalization over a large, possibly infinite, set of environments. Such environments are modeled as discrete Markov decision processes with both states and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Mirco Mutti , Riccardo De Santi , Emanuele Rossi , Juan Felipe Calderon , Michael Bronstein , Marcello Restelli

Agents are systems that optimize an objective function in an environment. Together, the goal and the environment induce secondary objectives, incentives. Modeling the agent-environment interaction using causal influence diagrams, we can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-21 Tom Everitt , Pedro A. Ortega , Elizabeth Barnes , Shane Legg

Active inference helps us simulate adaptive behavior and decision-making in biological and artificial agents. Building on our previous work exploring the relationship between active inference, well-being, resilience, and sustainability, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Mahault Albarracin , Ines Hipolito , Maria Raffa , Paul Kinghorn

How do we know if communication is emerging in a multi-agent system? The vast majority of recent papers on emergent communication show that adding a communication channel leads to an increase in reward or task success. This is a useful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-14 Ryan Lowe , Jakob Foerster , Y-Lan Boureau , Joelle Pineau , Yann Dauphin