A Unified Framework for Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Di Ventura, Jacopo, Kleuker, Jan Felix, Plaat, Aske, Moerland, Thomas
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Di Ventura, Jacopo
Kleuker, Jan Felix
Plaat, Aske
Moerland, Thomas
author_facet Di Ventura, Jacopo
Kleuker, Jan Felix
Plaat, Aske
Moerland, Thomas
contents Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a setting for developing general agents, capable of solving downstream tasks without additional training or planning at test-time. While conventional RL optimizes policies for fixed rewards, zero-shot RL requires learning representations that enable immediate adaptation to arbitrary reward functions. As the field matures, the growing diversity of approaches demands a foundational framework reconciling different perspectives under a common unifying structure. In this work, we introduce a formal, unified framework for zero-shot RL, allowing for rigorous comparisons across methods. We propose a taxonomy organizing the algorithmic landscape along two levels: representation, distinguishing between compositional and direct methods based on their exploitation of action-value function decompositions; and learning paradigm, differentiating between reward-free and pseudo reward-free training. Additionally, we propose a unified view of existing error bounds, decomposing the total error into three primary contributing components: inference, reward, and approximation, serving as a foundation for more grounded comparisons of zero-shot methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_20542
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Unified Framework for Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning
Di Ventura, Jacopo
Kleuker, Jan Felix
Plaat, Aske
Moerland, Thomas
Machine Learning
Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a setting for developing general agents, capable of solving downstream tasks without additional training or planning at test-time. While conventional RL optimizes policies for fixed rewards, zero-shot RL requires learning representations that enable immediate adaptation to arbitrary reward functions. As the field matures, the growing diversity of approaches demands a foundational framework reconciling different perspectives under a common unifying structure. In this work, we introduce a formal, unified framework for zero-shot RL, allowing for rigorous comparisons across methods. We propose a taxonomy organizing the algorithmic landscape along two levels: representation, distinguishing between compositional and direct methods based on their exploitation of action-value function decompositions; and learning paradigm, differentiating between reward-free and pseudo reward-free training. Additionally, we propose a unified view of existing error bounds, decomposing the total error into three primary contributing components: inference, reward, and approximation, serving as a foundation for more grounded comparisons of zero-shot methods.
title A Unified Framework for Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20542