English
Related papers

Related papers: Model-Free RL Agents Demonstrate System 1-Like Int…

200 papers

Understanding the behavior of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents -particularly as task and agent sophistication increase- requires more than simple comparison of reward curves, yet standard methods for behavioral analysis remain…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Riley Simmons-Edler , Ryan P. Badman , Felix Baastad Berg , Raymond Chua , John J. Vastola , Joshua Lunger , William Qian , Kanaka Rajan

What does it mean to plan? Current agentic systems, whether scaffolded workflows or end-to-end policies, rely on reactive decision-making: selecting the next action via a fixed procedure with at most undifferentiated adaptive computation…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Mingkai Deng , Jinyu Hou , Zhiting Hu , Eric Xing

A "model" is a theory that describes the state of an environment and the effects of an agent's decisions on the environment. A model-based agent can use its model to predict the effects of its future actions and so plan ahead, but must know…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Stassa Patsantzis

Many state-of-the-art LLMs are trained to think before giving their answer. Reasoning can greatly improve language model capabilities, but it also makes them less interactive: given a new input, a model must stop thinking before it can…

Recently, there has been increasing interest in transparency and interpretability in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) systems. Verbal explanations, as the most natural way of communication in our daily life, deserve more attention, since…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Xinzhi Wang , Huao Li , Hui Zhang , Michael Lewis , Katia Sycara

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with complex multi-step planning tasks, showing high rates of constraint violations and inconsistent solutions. Existing strategies such as Chain-of-Thought and ReAct rely on implicit state…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Annu Rana , Gaurav Kumar

The debate on whether or not humans have free will has been raging for centuries. Although there are good arguments based on our current understanding of the laws of nature for the view that it is not possible for humans to have free will,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Erik M. Rehn

Design patterns have been used in various fields of inquiry and endeavour to externalize procedural knowledge in a form that supports human reasoning and coordination. In this paper, we show that contemporary Large Language Model…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Joseph Corneli , Charles J. Danoff , Raymond S. Puzio , Sridevi Ayloo , Sergio Belich , Andre Wilkinson , Mary Tedeschi , Pauline Mosley

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) generally suffers from poor sample complexity, mostly due to the need to exhaustively explore the state-action space to find well-performing policies. On the other hand, we postulate that expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Loris Di Natale , Bratislav Svetozarevic , Philipp Heer , Colin N. Jones

Active inference is a first principle account of how autonomous agents operate in dynamic, non-stationary environments. This problem is also considered in reinforcement learning (RL), but limited work exists on comparing the two approaches…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Noor Sajid , Philip J. Ball , Thomas Parr , Karl J. Friston

While LLMs exhibit impressive fluency and factual recall, they struggle with robust causal reasoning, often relying on spurious correlations and brittle patterns. Similarly, traditional Reinforcement Learning agents also lack causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Abi Aryan , Zac Liu

A long-standing goal in AI is to develop agents capable of solving diverse tasks across a range of environments, including those never seen during training. Two dominant paradigms address this challenge: (i) reinforcement learning (RL),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Vlad Sobal , Wancong Zhang , Kyunghyun Cho , Randall Balestriero , Tim G. J. Rudner , Yann LeCun

Traditional agentic workflows rely on external prompts to manage interactions with tools and the environment, which limits the autonomy of reasoning models. We position \emph{Large Agent Models (LAMs)} that internalize the generation of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Yuxiang Zhang , Yuqi Yang , Jiangming Shu , Xinyan Wen , Jitao Sang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has traditionally focused on training specialized agents to optimize predefined reward functions within narrowly defined environments. However, the advent of powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) and increasingly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Fangming Cui , Ruixiao Zhu , Cheng Fang , Sunan Li , Jiahong Li

Recent work in AI safety has highlighted that in sequential decision making, objectives are often underspecified or incomplete. This gives discretion to the acting agent to realize the stated objective in ways that may result in undesirable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Parand Alizadeh Alamdari , Toryn Q. Klassen , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated strong reasoning and role-playing capabilities, opening new opportunities for agent-based social simulations. However, most existing agents' implementations are scenario-tailored,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Yuwei Yan , Jinghua Piao , Xiaochong Lan , Chenyang Shao , Pan Hui , Yong Li

In an unfamiliar setting, a model-based reinforcement learning agent can be limited by the accuracy of its world model. In this work, we present a novel, training-free approach to improving the performance of such agents separately from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Martin Benfeghoul , Umais Zahid , Qinghai Guo , Zafeirios Fountas

This paper proposes an intent-aware multi-agent planning framework as well as a learning algorithm. Under this framework, an agent plans in the goal space to maximize the expected utility. The planning process takes the belief of other…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-03-07 Siyuan Qi , Song-Chun Zhu

Advances in the field of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) have led to sophisticated inference frameworks that relax the original modeling assumption of observing an agent behavior that reflects only a single intention. Instead of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-03 Adrian Šošić , Elmar Rueckert , Jan Peters , Abdelhak M. Zoubir , Heinz Koeppl

Large language models have enabled agents of all kinds to interact with users through natural conversation. Consequently, agents now have two jobs: conversing and planning/reasoning. Their conversational responses must be informed by all…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Konstantina Christakopoulou , Shibl Mourad , Maja Matarić