Related papers: Information-Theoretic Policy Pre-Training with Emp…

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…

Empowerment is an information-theoretic method that can be used to intrinsically motivate learning agents. It attempts to maximize an agent's control over the environment by encouraging visiting states with a large number of reachable next…

This paper develops generalizations of empowerment to continuous states. Empowerment is a recently introduced information-theoretic quantity motivated by hypotheses about the efficiency of the sensorimotor loop in biological organisms, but…

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms designed for handling complex visual observations typically learn some sort of latent state representation, either explicitly or implicitly. Standard methods of this sort do not distinguish…

Empowerment quantifies the influence an agent has on its environment. This is formally achieved by the maximum of the expected KL-divergence between the distribution of the successor state conditioned on a specific action and a distribution…

We introduce a methodology for efficiently computing a lower bound to empowerment, allowing it to be used as an unsupervised cost function for policy learning in real-time control. Empowerment, being the channel capacity between actions and…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is inspired by the way human infants and animals learn from the environment. The setting is somewhat idealized because, in actual tasks, other agents in the environment have their own goals and behave adaptively…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm in Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabling agents to learn optimal behaviors through interactions with their environments. Drawing from the foundations of trial and error, RL…

Mutual Information between agent Actions and environment States (MIAS) quantifies the influence of agent on its environment. Recently, it was found that the maximization of MIAS can be used as an intrinsic motivation for artificial agents.…

Reinforcement learning provides a general framework for flexible decision making and control, but requires extensive data collection for each new task that an agent needs to learn. In other machine learning fields, such as natural language…

Empowerment has the potential to help agents learn large skillsets, but is not yet a scalable solution for training general-purpose agents. Recent empowerment methods learn diverse skillsets by maximizing the mutual information between…

This book chapter is an introduction to and an overview of the information-theoretic, task independent utility function "Empowerment", which is defined as the channel capacity between an agent's actions and an agent's sensors. It quantifies…

Reinforcement learning agents that operate in diverse and complex environments can benefit from the structured decomposition of their behavior. Often, this is addressed in the context of hierarchical reinforcement learning, where the aim is…

The growing disparity between the exponential scaling of computational resources and the finite growth of high-quality text data now constrains conventional scaling approaches for large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we…

Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Reinforcement Learning (RL), a subfield of Artificial Intelligence (AI), focuses on training agents to make decisions by interacting with their environment to maximize cumulative rewards. This paper provides an overview of RL, covering its…

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have proved that given an environment we can learn to perform a task in that environment if we have access to some form of a reward function (dense, sparse or derived from IRL). But most of the…

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) works well when experience can be collected cheaply and model-based RL is effective when system dynamics can be modeled accurately. However, both assumptions can be violated in real world problems such…