Why Self-Supervised Encoders Want to Be Normal

arXiv:2604.27743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a geometric and information-theoretic framework for encoder-decoder learning built on the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle. Recasting IB as

arXiv:2604.24558v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent work in hierarchical reinforcement learning has shown success in scaling to billions of timesteps when learning over a set of predefined option reward functions. We show that, instead of using a single reward function per option, the reward functions can be effectively used to induce a space of behaviours, by letting the controller specify linear combinations over reward functions, allowing a more expressive set of policies to be represented. We call this method Hierarchical Behaviour Spaces (HBS). We evaluate HBS on the NetHack Learning Environment, demonstrating strong performance. We conduct a series of experiments and determine that, perhaps going against conventional wisdom, the benefits of hierarchy in our method come from increased exploration rather than long term reasoning.

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