GIRL: Generative Imagination Reinforcement Learning via Information-Theoretic Hallucination Control

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1. Verfasser: Hiremath, Prakul Sunil
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Hiremath, Prakul Sunil
author_facet Hiremath, Prakul Sunil
contents Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) improves sample efficiency by optimizing policies inside imagined rollouts, but long-horizon planning degrades when model errors compound and imagined trajectories drift off the training manifold. We introduce GIRL (Generative Imagination Reinforcement Learning), a latent world-model framework that addresses this failure mode with two key components. First, a cross-modal grounding signal derived from a frozen foundation model (DINOv2) anchors the latent transition prior to a semantically consistent embedding space, penalizing inconsistent or implausible predictions. Second, an uncertainty-adaptive trust-region bottleneck interprets the KL regularizer as the Lagrange multiplier of a constrained optimization problem, restricting imagination drift within a learned region calibrated by Expected Information Gain and a Relative Performance Loss signal. We re-derive a value-gap bound using the Performance Difference Lemma and Integral Probability Metrics, yielding a bound that remains informative as the discount factor approaches one and connects the objective to real-environment regret. Experiments across three benchmark suites, including DeepMind Control, Adroit Hand Manipulation, and Meta-World with visual distractors, show that GIRL reduces latent rollout drift by 38 to 61 percent across tasks relative to DreamerV3, improves asymptotic return, and requires fewer environment interactions on long-horizon tasks. GIRL also outperforms TD-MPC2 on sparse-reward and high-contact settings under standard evaluation metrics. A distilled-prior variant reduces inference overhead and improves computational efficiency relative to the full model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_07426
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GIRL: Generative Imagination Reinforcement Learning via Information-Theoretic Hallucination Control
Hiremath, Prakul Sunil
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.6; I.2.8
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) improves sample efficiency by optimizing policies inside imagined rollouts, but long-horizon planning degrades when model errors compound and imagined trajectories drift off the training manifold. We introduce GIRL (Generative Imagination Reinforcement Learning), a latent world-model framework that addresses this failure mode with two key components. First, a cross-modal grounding signal derived from a frozen foundation model (DINOv2) anchors the latent transition prior to a semantically consistent embedding space, penalizing inconsistent or implausible predictions. Second, an uncertainty-adaptive trust-region bottleneck interprets the KL regularizer as the Lagrange multiplier of a constrained optimization problem, restricting imagination drift within a learned region calibrated by Expected Information Gain and a Relative Performance Loss signal. We re-derive a value-gap bound using the Performance Difference Lemma and Integral Probability Metrics, yielding a bound that remains informative as the discount factor approaches one and connects the objective to real-environment regret. Experiments across three benchmark suites, including DeepMind Control, Adroit Hand Manipulation, and Meta-World with visual distractors, show that GIRL reduces latent rollout drift by 38 to 61 percent across tasks relative to DreamerV3, improves asymptotic return, and requires fewer environment interactions on long-horizon tasks. GIRL also outperforms TD-MPC2 on sparse-reward and high-contact settings under standard evaluation metrics. A distilled-prior variant reduces inference overhead and improves computational efficiency relative to the full model.
title GIRL: Generative Imagination Reinforcement Learning via Information-Theoretic Hallucination Control
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.6; I.2.8
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07426