Related papers: Imperfect World Models are Exploitable
Reward hacking arises when a model improves a proxy reward by exploiting shortcuts rather than solving the intended task. We study this failure mode through the geometry of reinforcement learning updates in language models and argue that…
We present a representation-driven framework for reinforcement learning. By representing policies as estimates of their expected values, we leverage techniques from contextual bandits to guide exploration and exploitation. Particularly,…
Prior work has proposed a simple strategy for reinforcement learning (RL): label experience with the outcomes achieved in that experience, and then imitate the relabeled experience. These outcome-conditioned imitation learning methods are…
We consider a sequence of repeated interactions between an agent and an environment. Uncertainty about the environment is captured by a probability distribution over a space of hypotheses, which includes all computable functions. Given a…
Recommendation systems often face exploration-exploitation tradeoffs: the system can only learn about the desirability of new options by recommending them to some user. Such systems can thus be modeled as multi-armed bandit settings;…
World models - learned internal simulators of environment dynamics - are rapidly becoming foundational to autonomous decision-making in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and agentic AI. By predicting future states in compressed latent spaces,…
Learning-based controllers are often purposefully kept out of real-world applications due to concerns about their safety and reliability. We explore how state-of-the-art world models in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning can be utilized…
As machine learning models are increasingly used in critical decision-making settings (e.g., healthcare, finance), there has been a growing emphasis on developing methods to explain model predictions. Such \textit{explanations} are used to…
It has been a long-standing dream to design artificial agents that explore their environment efficiently via intrinsic motivation, similar to how children perform curious free play. Despite recent advances in intrinsically motivated…
We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…
The inherent trade-off in on-line learning is between exploration and exploitation. A good balance between these two (conflicting) goals can achieve a better long-term performance. Can we define an optimal balance? We propose to study this…
We propose a set of precise criteria for saying a neural net learns and uses a "world model." The goal is to give an operational meaning to terms that are often used informally, in order to provide a common language for experimental…
Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…
Chain-of-thought explanations are widely used to inspect the decision process of large language models (LLMs) and to evaluate the trustworthiness of model outputs, making them important for effective collaboration between LLMs and humans.…
Solving real-life sequential decision making problems under partial observability involves an exploration-exploitation problem. To be successful, an agent needs to efficiently gather valuable information about the state of the world for…
Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…
While data-driven predictive models are a strictly technological construct, they may operate within a social context in which benign engineering choices entail implicit, indirect and unexpected real-life consequences. Fairness of such…
Full models of the world require complex knowledge of immense detail. While pre-trained large models have been hypothesized to contain similar knowledge due to extensive pre-training on vast amounts of internet scale data, using them…
Imitation learning trains a policy by mimicking expert demonstrations. Various imitation methods were proposed and empirically evaluated, meanwhile, their theoretical understanding needs further studies. In this paper, we firstly analyze…
We discuss the possibility of world models and active exploration as emergent properties of open-ended behavior optimization in autonomous agents. In discussing the source of the open-endedness of living things, we start from the…