Time and temporal abstraction in continual learning: tradeoffs, analogies and regret in an active measuring setting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This conceptual paper provides theoretical results linking notions in semi-supervised learning (SSL) and hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) in the context of lifelong learning. Specifically, our construction sets up a direct analogy between intermediate representations in SSL and temporal abstraction in RL, highlighting the important role of factorization in both types of hierarchy and the relevance of partial labeling, resp. partial observation. The construction centres around a simple class of Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) where we show tools and results from SSL imply lower bounds on regret holding for any RL algorithm without access to temporal abstraction. While our lower bound is for a restricted class of RL problems, it applies to arbitrary RL algorithms in this setting. The setting moreover features so-called “active measuring”, an aspect of widespread relevance in industrial control, but - possibly due to its lifelong learning flavour - not yet well-studied in RL. Our formalization makes it possible to think about tradeoffs that apply for such control problems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".