Reinforcement Learning as One Big Sequence Modeling Problem
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reinforcement learning (RL) is typically concerned with estimating single-step policies or single-step models, leveraging the Markov property to factorize the problem in time. However, we can also view RL as a sequence problem, with the goal being to predict a sequence of actions that leads to a sequence of high rewards. Viewed in this way, it is tempting to consider whether powerful, high-capacity sequence prediction models that work well in other domains, such as natural-language processing, can also provide simple and effective solutions to the RL problem. To this end, we explore how RL can be reframed as one big sequence modeling problem, using state-of-the-art Transformer architectures to model distributions over sequences of states, actions, and rewards. Addressing RL as a sequence problem significantly simplifies a range of design decisions: we no longer require separate behavior policy constraints, as is common in prior work on offline model-free RL, and we no longer require ensembles or other epistemic uncertainty estimators, as is common in prior work on model-based RL. All of these roles are filled by the same Transformer sequence model. In our experiments, we demonstrate the flexibility of this approach across long-horizon dynamics prediction, imitation learning, goal-conditioned RL, and offline RL.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it