Action chunking as conditional policy compression
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many skills in our everyday lives are learned by sequencing actions towards a desired goal. The action sequence can become a ``chunk'' when individual actions are grouped together and executed as one unit, making them more efficient to store and execute. While chunking has been studied extensively across various domains, a puzzle remains as to why and under what conditions action chunking occurs. To tackle these questions, we develop a model of conditional policy compression—the reduction in cognitive cost by conditioning on an additional source of information—to explain the origin of chunking. We argue that chunking is a result of optimizing the trade-off between reward and conditional policy complexity. Chunking compresses policies when there is temporal structure in the environment that can be leveraged for action selection, reducing the amount of memory necessary to encode the policy. We experimentally confirm our model's predictions, showing that chunking reduces conditional policy complexity and reaction times. Chunking also increases with working memory load, consistent with the hypothesis that the degree of policy compression scales with the scarcity of cognitive resources. Finally, chunking also reduces overall working memory load, freeing cognitive resources for the benefit of other, not-chunked information.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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