Teaching Agents the "Principle", Not the "Reward"

arXiv:2611.07130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning has achieved strong performance in many tasks by letting agents learn from nothing more than a reward signal. However, in more complex tasks, agents still struggle to learn good, generalizable policies, even with carefully designed rewards and abundant samples. We argue that this difficulty stems from the reward decoding burden: designers encode their knowledge of the desired behavior into rewards and penalties, and agents must infer this knowledge from long sequences of noisy scalars.